Black Holes

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Hello, I'm Robin Inst, and I'm very pleased to welcome you to another new Infinite Monkey Cage show.

In particular, I'm excited because apparently I'm going to find out that I'm just a hologram, and that's going to take a lot of pressure off me.

If you're just a hologram, does that mean you'll speak less and give me a bit more chance?

Anyway, look, listen to the show.

You're going to find out that the world of black holes and beyond beyond is something that is very discombobulating, but in a good way.

Hello, welcome to the Infinite Monkey Cage.

Yet again, we are recording over four time zones, if time really exists.

I'm Robin Itz.

And I'm Brian Cox.

On today's show, we aim to offer a distraction from the frequently disappointing reality of human ignorance by exploring the naturally occurring objects that best reveal our ignorance.

Right, I have no idea what you're talking about.

This sounds even more ridiculous than when we did that show about quantum mechanics.

No, let me explain there are two sorts of ignorance, Robin.

There's the disappointing sort of ignorance made manifest when trying to explain to someone on Twitter that the Earth is round.

And then there's the magnificent ignorance that stimulates curiosity and the generation of new knowledge.

In this case, our ignorance about the strangest objects we know to exist in the universe, black holes.

Right, can I find out?

Are we going to do the former or the latter?

The latter.

I am much better on the former, whereas I know very little about what happens to the sails of a ship when it goes over the event horizon, but I presume you'll probably be explaining that.

It's a very good question, actually, Robin.

What would happen if a ship crossed the horizon of a black hole?

Would it cross into the interior unharmed?

Would it be incinerated as it approached the horizon?

Does a black hole even have an interior?

And could our attempts to understand these questions suggest that the universe we experience may be a hologram?

To explain these most remarkable naturally occurring objects, we're joined by two distinguished scientists and the Barry Manilow of the baked potato.

And they are.

I'm Sean Carroll, I'm a theoretical physicist at Caltech in Pasadena, California.

And my most important mistake that really bugs me in movies when it comes to science is actually in Walt Disney's The Black Hole, because they show you going into the black hole, and behind the event horizon is heaven and hell.

And I'm pretty sure that's not actually accurate.

So I think that that has misled people for a long time.

I'm Jenna Levin.

I'm an astrophysicist.

I'm a professor at Barnard and Columbia in New York City.

I was thinking about this very, very accurate movie, which is 2001, Space Odyssey.

And there's a scene where one of the characters gets into a depressurized pod, trying to get back into the spacecraft after Hal's kicked him out.

And he's there without his helmet on, I believe, for like 14 seconds.

And there is this big argument about whether or not his head would explode.

And apparently Kubrick filmed it with him wearing the helmet originally and then discovered some research saying that he could survive for 14 seconds and then re-filmed it without the helmet.

Now that might not be a true story but I just thought it was pretty fascinating because it wasn't actually a mistake.

I'm Matt Lucas

and the mistake that really bugs me in movies is The Spy Who Loves Me.

They have a shark in a swimming pool but every shark I've ever seen has Varukas and they wouldn't even be allowed into the footpool

of a swimming bath because you just would pass that on.

So I just felt that was very inaccurate and actually just set a really bad example to people to do something like that.

And this is our panel.

And now please react at home in the way the studio audience we normally have would react until everyone in your neighborhood appears to be confused by your whooping and hollering.

Right Matt, it is lovely to have you here.

This is

the first time we've had you on the show and to some extent we've been throwing you into a deep end in terms of the nature of the physics of the universe.

So, I just want to give you some warning and get an initial artistic reaction to what we're going to be dealing with in black holes.

Now, this afternoon, I was chatting with Brian, and Brian said to me, If you were to dive into a black hole, then from your perspective, you'd sail across the event horizon into the black hole completely unharmed, and then be spaghettified close to the singularity at the centre.

Whereas, from the perspective of someone watching you fall in, you'd be frazzled before you entered, and your atoms will be smeared around the outside, and both may be true.

So, this is the kind of thing that we're going to be dealing with.

What's your initial emotional reaction?

No, I'm good with it.

I've actually been on the black hole.

It was Richmond water slides.

And

so, you know, I've actually been on the black hole.

I've been through it, yeah.

And did you get a sense of the difference in time between the

observer of a screaming parent and then?

Yeah, because there's a bit where it's quite dark, and there's another bit where there's sort of lights,

and then there's a bit where as you go through the water slide, you see where somebody else's mat is stuck to the side of the water slide where they've lost their mat on the way down so yeah it's quite perilous I'm assuming that's the black hole you're referring to yeah I really had no idea that you'd actually done so much revision for the show already this is a very very few of our non-scientist guests bother to actually have that level of experience so I think this is going to hopefully enrich the conversation for Jana and and Sean as well Sean I want to start with you because every time we have you on the show it hurts there is always a point back in the last series talking about quantum mechanics, there's kind of five minutes where you go, aha, aha, and then you go, well, everything changes.

So I want to start off with something which hopefully is the simplest part of today's show, which is what is the definition of a black hole.

Well, you know, science is supposed to hurt if you're doing it right.

It's supposed to hurt the cells in your brain from the exercise.

And a black hole is something that comes out of Einstein's theory of gravity, general relativity, that he proposed over 100 years ago.

And his idea was that space-time, where we live, you know, the three dimensions of space, the one dimension of time, is curved.

It can sort of bend in on itself, and that bending is what you and I experience as gravity.

He has that idea plus this extra idea that nobody can travel faster than the speed of light.

And combined, you get the possibility that there's a region of space-time where gravity is so strong that literally nothing can escape.

Because in order to escape, you would have to travel faster than the speed of light.

and that's what a black hole is.

A black hole is something where there's so much energy, so much mass has been packed into a tiny region of space that gravity has become so strong that it's a one-way trip.

Once you go in, you can never come out.

Jana, that sounds simple.

Yeah.

It does sound simple.

In a way, the black hole is incredibly simple because it's absolutely nothing there.

It's unlike anything else that we would ordinarily call an object in the universe.

It's not a star.

It's not made of technically stuff.

It's actually empty space.

And that region, the event horizon beyond which not even light can escape, is nothing.

There's no, it's like stepping into the shadow of a tree to some extent.

Sean, I watched a lecture that you did about black holes, and for me, the thing that seems most remarkable is that their existence, from what I can gather, means that at least one of the laws of physics pretty much is going to have to be sacrificed to understand them.

Is that right?

That what we're looking at is there are ideas in physics physics which will not survive an understanding of the black hole?

Yeah, there's this not only general relativity, there's this other big theory of physics, quantum mechanics.

And sadly, they don't really play nicely together as of yet.

We don't have a one, once and for all, final theory of quantum gravity, as you would call it.

So people like Stephen Hawking have made great strides in understanding how to blend together quantum mechanics and gravity near a black hole, but it seems to lead to, let's just say, uncomfortable conclusions.

This is why black holes have been an absolutely central concern of theoretical physicists in the last few decades, because even though our observational data about them is pretty meagre, we know they're there, we know that they're basically what Einstein said they should be, but not much more than that.

But from a theorist point of view, they're a wonderful playground for figuring out how we can test our ideas about reconciling quantum mechanics with the rest of the universe.

Matt, because you already, you know, you've ridden some of the major theoretical physics rides at the theme parks, I'm going to up the ante a little bit now with the questionnaire.

Laws of physics-wise, are there any that you're particularly wedded to that you would feel particularly sad at losing?

Well, I'm not a very good sleeper, so I'm very happy to just lose sleep, just get rid of sleep for everyone.

The need for sleep.

Is that more biological than physics?

Yeah, but biological.

Everything's physics in the end.

Yeah, applies to it.

Honestly, I feel like I've wandered into the wrong room.

Matt, I've been wandering into the wrong room now for a hundred and twenty-seven episodes.

Well they say every conversation should have something nobody understands out of respect for physics.

Oh yes, no I appreciate that but this for me is like simulated dementia.

I say what why don't we try and and make it simpler.

These discussions are often phrased in terms of two observers,

usually called Alice and Bob, where one stays outside a long way from the black hole.

Let's say that's Bob and Alice flies flies towards the black hole, crosses the event horizon.

And the discussion is often framed in terms of what those two observers experience and see.

So, first of all, I think we should change that.

So, I don't think we should have Alice and Bob.

I think we should have Robin and Matt.

So, yeah, well,

that's also very, I think, reflective of the kind of loving, sometimes physical relationship me and Robin have had over the years.

So, I like that.

Which

falling into the black hole?

Which one of us is Arthur?

Who wants to to go in?

Which one is Martha?

Is that what you're saying?

Yes.

So

yeah, it's a good question.

So who wants to dive into the black hole?

Who wants to sit outside and watch?

Fine.

Why do not go into the black hole?

I'm going in.

So why don't we send Jana in with you?

And Jana, what would you, with Matt, experience

as you cross the event horizon?

and fall into the black hole.

So the beautiful part is that we would really not experience anything extraordinary as long as the black hole was big enough.

That might sound counterintuitive, but the bigger the black hole, the less in some sense you notice the curvature.

So similarly with the Earth, the bigger it is.

You don't notice the curvature as much as if you're standing on a basketball and you're really aware of it.

So you could pass right through the event horizon of a black hole.

There's no material there.

There's no substance there.

Your experience should be of weightlessness, like you were floating in the International Space Station, and we could be joking and having a perfectly good time.

And it would happen in a matter of seconds for us.

And then we would have the unhappy realization that we were inside the black hole.

Would we never be able to get out of it?

Is that the same thing?

We would never be able to get out of it.

At least not in our current form.

Well, hang on a minute.

Do they have Wi-Fi there?

Because as long as I can Instagram from there, I'm quite happy.

Well, actually, you could get Wi-Fi.

So here's one of the misunderstandings about black holes is that they are absolutely utterly dark from the outside, but they can be bright on the inside.

So Matt, you and I could watch what was going on in the galaxy.

We could see the light could rain in behind us.

And if we arranged it properly, we could get this kind of view, the saturated view of the galaxy sped up, and we'd get really fast Wi-Fi, actually.

Well, I'm up for it if you are.

Yeah.

This is a

classic dating show created by physicists.

I think it's the single singularity bar.

It's the single singularity bar.

I mean, can I just ask when you were just talking, because one of the things that I found most amazing, I don't know how true this is, but as you are falling in, is it right that what I would observe, sorry, Matt would observe as he's falling in,

and you're going with him, what are you seeing of the galaxy outside?

It would look like time was going very quickly in the rest of the galaxy compared to our clocks.

So we might see civilizations come and go.

You know, we might see the Statue of Liberty buried in the sand.

We might see,

and because it would be so concentrated, so many colors, so much information, it would probably get to be this kind of bright white light.

You know, I call it like the light at the end of the tunnel in a near-death experience, but

it's a total death experience.

You just don't have that much law.

It's not just, yeah,

there's no coming back from that one.

And the problem is, is that inside the black hole, effectively, to some extent, space and time have switched places.

That outside what you imagine to be the center of a sphere of this black hole, Fermat and I would be a point in our future of time, actually.

And so we could no more avoid the really bad part, which is a singularity, than we can avoid the next second in time.

So there is this inevitability that we would be crushed to death by the space-time, our bits would be torn apart, we'd be brought down to our fundamental particles, and then we don't really know what happens.

I'm still open to it, but can you just.

Is it all right if you go through my agent?

That's all.

No, I just wanted to say for those of you listening to the podcast and on the radio, we can see each other.

And Matt's face was increasingly horrified as it was told his fate in the black hole.

Yeah, I wish you could have seen it.

Well,

I quite enjoy life.

So voluntarily going into a black hole, I think I've maybe drawn the short straw.

I'd like to send Robin there now.

I've changed.

No,

Well, Matt, all kinds of interesting things could happen.

It could be that our

quantum particles and bits of information are like blown out into a new universe and we get to start the whole ecosystem over again.

Or

something like that.

Yeah, we could start, we could become sort of the seeds of a new universe and like maybe some of our atoms would combine and we'd be different entities.

But there's also a possibility, and I'm getting a little bit ahead of myself here, that there are these hypothesized wormholes inside the black hole that will actually connect us to the outside of the black hole.

We're going to guess that.

We should slow down on that.

So, Sean, now, you're with Robin outside the black hole, watching Matt and Jana jump in.

What do you see?

Yeah, we definitely made the right decision when it was decided to be who's going to jump in and who's going to remain outside.

Stephen Hawking told us in the 1970s that if you look at a black hole from far away, it faintly glows.

it gives off radiation.

And due to the effects of relativity, if you sort of sneak up close to the black hole and you hover just above it, that radiation looks incredibly bright, incredibly high energy.

So to a person from the outside, even though general relativity and Einstein say the black hole is a region of space inside of which gravity is so strong, to a person from outside, it looks like the surface of the black hole is the black hole.

It looks like the surface of the black hole is giving off incredibly high-intensity radiation.

You can even do physics on it.

You can describe it in terms of its energy and its entropy and other physical properties.

So, to us, Matt and Jana would not have disappeared behind the horizon.

They would have been smeared all over the horizon.

They would have been essentially incinerated and joined this incredibly high-energy but completely disorderly mess.

No, I've changed my mind again.

I'm definitely going to send Robin through to get smushed.

But I don't want to be smushed everywhere.

No.

No, thank you for everything.

I know, but like I said, please, can you just go through my agent and not contact me directly about this?

Because

it's much harder for me to say no to things if people contact me directly.

It's much easier for my agent to say no, thanks.

Matt doesn't fancy going through a black hole.

No, but you see, the problem is, Matt, that there are so many twists and turns.

So now you've said no again, and then any moment now, Brianna goes, but actually it turns out, and then eventually after being smeared, you become God.

Oh, all right, then I will go back into the black one.

Well, let's wait and see if that happens.

Here we see, though, both Jana and Sean, here we see the first signs of a problem because it seems that what we've described are in one scenario, from the point of view of Matt and Jana, you fall across the event horizon, nothing happens to you.

Admittedly, you get spaghettified or squashed at the singularity, but you can cross the horizon.

Whereas, from the other perspective, you get smeared out, incinerated in some sense on the horizon.

You never cross into the interior.

So, what is the resolution to that contradiction?

It appears like a contradiction.

One of the original resolutions, which is which we're moving away from, honestly, was this idea of complementarity, that there are complementary descriptions.

You can't always know everything simultaneously, but you can know one description and then you can know another description, and they're complementary.

So there's this idea of black hole complementarity that Matt and I, if we've gotten to a really huge black hole, trillions of times the mass of the sun, we might have a good year before we get grudged together in the singularity.

And that's our real experience.

And then from outside the black hole, you from the outside never see us fall in.

We from the inside have this year of laughs.

And

unless you can find somebody who can simultaneously find a contradiction, observe both things at once,

you're not in trouble.

And that was interesting for a while, but then it ran into some problems.

And I think this is probably where Sean...

Sorry, I was just going to ask Matt, because, again, your facial expressions were quite wonderful there.

But

a serious question, really.

What we're being told is that if black hole complementarity were right, and Sean will talk about that in a moment, then there are two different versions of reality that happen.

Just to reiterate, there's one where you could spend a year with Jana inside the event horizon and have experiences and so on, and another version of reality, equally real, where you didn't get in there, you got smeared out and incinerated.

So I'm still not very well-versed in all of this.

So I'd follow your advice, really.

I mean, the black hole.

I don't know.

Can we do social distancing in a black hole?

Not at the end, because the singularity forces everything together.

Well,

then I definitely don't advise going up there.

It will also destroy the virus into its fundamental bits.

So we're fine.

Oh,

all right then.

Well I think then maybe we should.

Sean, let's throw it to you.

So black hole complementarity.

Essentially the idea is that both things can

be real if there's no contradiction.

Yeah, that's right.

And in particular, here's how I like to think about it.

But I should say, even before going into it, that we don't know, okay?

Like just for the audience out there, when we talk about Einstein predicting the existence of black holes, that we know, that we're very comfortable with.

There are black holes in the universe at the center of our galaxy, there's a several million solar mass black hole, there's other black holes we've detected using gravitational waves.

As soon as we get into this talk of what it would be like to fall in, what about the radiation coming out, we're kind of guessing, we're kind of trying to grope our way towards understanding.

And like Robin said at the start, it seems as if we're going to have to give up on some very, very important ideas.

And so many people, including myself, think that the idea we're mostly going to have to give up on is the idea that you and I are located somewhere in space.

That there's something called where we are.

Right?

All this stuff from black holes evaporating and complementarity and so forth seems to say that the idea of a location in space is just kind of a good approximation.

It kind of makes us feel good in the right circumstances, but when things get extreme, it's just kind of somewhat true, but not the fundamental reality.

The fundamental reality is something non-local.

Your essence does not have a location in space.

It is spread out in some quantum mechanical wave function.

And in the right circumstances, you can think about that as a little wormhole connecting two different parts of space where information can be connected in between them.

And maybe this is going to grow into some wonderful way of thinking about about the emergence of space-time from fundamentally quantum mechanical stuff.

I'm going to have to make you go over that again because I think for anyone listening, there is such a sense of a solid place in space-time, wherever people are sitting now or whatever they're doing now, whatever they're sitting on, all of those things that the solidity, I think for anyone who is not au fait with this particular idea, maybe even some who are, it seems so contradictory to our experience.

Yeah, and you're not alone.

Einstein was was someone who absolutely believed exactly the same thing, that it would be hard even to imagine doing physics if you couldn't talk about where things were in space and time.

And so the point of view that I just sort of half-heartedly advocated was one in which space and time lose their centrality.

We ordinarily think of space and time as where we're located, right?

Like that's the stage on which all of physics plays out.

It's the first thing you have.

Here is space.

There's some stuff located in space.

It moves around and interacts over time.

But then quantum mechanics comes along and it lets us sort of maintain that illusion for a little while.

It weakens it.

In quantum mechanics, there are kinds of what Einstein called spooky action at a distance, where you can measure something one place in the universe and it seems to affect something someplace else.

But it all worked out very nicely.

so that even though that seemed to happen, you couldn't use it to send information faster than the speed of light or or any other dramatic observable effect.

So people kind of made their peace with it.

But now that we're putting gravity into the game, now that space-time is dynamical, now that it can move around, and you have quantum mechanics, which says that the things that you observe are not what there really is.

Observation is something that is just revealing a tiny sliver of the underlying reality.

It seems to be implying that the underlying reality doesn't put space and time in a central location.

It just kind of emerges out of something deeper that we're still trying to figure out.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: Well, this is also where the wormholes do come into the conversation.

And it's, I think, between what Brian and Sean said, it's important to emphasize that when the observer outside is seeing the Hawking radiation, they believe that you've been brought down to your fundamental constituent parts, which behave very quantum mechanically and don't have the illusions that we have of being in a firm location.

If that little particle had a consciousness, it would be comfortable with the idea of being in two places at once because that would be its familiar experience.

So these things are happening to fundamental quantum-behaving particles, not to entire people.

So if Matt and I got close enough to the center of the black hole that we started to be torn apart and shredded into our fundamental bits, quantum mechanics would also play for a role for us inside.

And the wormhole idea, which is extremely conjectural, very, very far from anything like a proof, really connects with what Sean says, because it says, Look, I can resolve any problems of this seeming like two different realities by suggesting that one of Matt's quantum particles inside the black hole is connected by a wormhole to a particle outside.

So they're actually the same particle.

Well, how do you feel, though, that you could be in this sense delocalized?

I mean, the idea that there can be

parts of you inside this black hole connected by a wormhole to part of you that's now this Hawking radiation, billions of light years away from the event horizon.

I mean,

to me, it just depends on what form that takes.

And I hope I don't come across as vulgar here, but you know, if my penis is inside the black hole but my testicles are outside of it, I don't think I would be very happy.

So I don't have a good feeling about that.

Well, that unfortunately could happen.

And And I'm going to say no.

I'm going to say no.

You know what, Matt?

This is a lesson in really thinking about what you're going to wear before going to the Event Horizon.

Don't think about wearing that nice baggie.

It's a lovely baggy look that you wear.

You make sure you wear something that's compact and keeps everything together.

The thing is, like, I just still, I still don't really understand much of what was said.

But

usually I would finish this sentence by saying, but it's nice to get out of the house.

But unfortunately, I'm still in my own house.

But I think it's what you're saying is interesting, isn't it?

That some of me could be inside and some of me could be outside at the same time.

But does that mean then it would just be like just my sort of the bottom half of me is sat at home watching Love Joy on UK Gold, and then the rest of me, the top half of me, is inside a black hole going, Oh no, oh no, like, you know, the bit at the beginning of Superman when the three of them are sort of

in that the three batteries are in that a flat piece of glass, sort of spinning around the universe, that's the top half of me inside a black hole, and then the bottom half of me is just on its own, breaking wind, watching you know, antiques roadshow.

Yeah, the bottom half.

How does the bottom half watch love joy?

Anyway,

so Sean, Robin's on UK gold repeatedly,

of course.

How silly of me.

Sean, this, could you outline this

idea, which I think is widely accepted, that

the information

stored in a black hole is stored on the outside, which we call the holographic principle.

Could you run through those ideas?

Yeah, I could try.

This is the first little hint of space not being quite as crucial as you might have thought.

The idea of quantum entanglement, that two different things in the universe can be separate from each other, but somehow related in the quantum mechanical state.

And then again, okay, okay, so now you do the whole thing in the presence of black holes, and you say, well, how much entanglement could you possibly have between what's inside the black hole and what's outside?

And in principle, you say, well, the black hole has a volume.

It's a three-dimensional region of space.

I could entangle with every little bit of what's going on inside the black hole.

So maybe the entanglement should be proportional to the volume inside.

But that's not right.

That's not how it works.

This is what Stephen Hawking and subsequent people told us.

The entanglement sort of seems to be proportional to the area, just to the boundary of the black hole.

So it's like all that you can become entangled with lives just on the other side of the horizon, not deep inside the black hole.

It's not even that, you know, which half of me is inside the black hole and which half is outside.

It's that there is no such thing as where I am.

That's how deep it gets, right?

A lot of people try to remember the famous drawing that looks like a rabbit or looks looks like a duck, depending on how you look at it.

You've seen this little picture.

And it would be a mistake to say, but which is it really?

Is it really a rabbit or a duck?

And that's like saying, are you really inside the black hole or really outside?

It just depends on how you look at it.

But if that's the case, then you're that is both a rabbit and a duck.

Yes.

So are you saying you are both inside and outside of the black hole?

Yes.

Well, then why didn't you just say that?

Yeah, all this non-locality.

Are you sure we didn't?

Jana,

why is this called the holographic principle?

You hear it said, it's become quite a popular idea or an idea in popular culture.

The universe is a hologram.

What do we mean by that?

So

a hologram is

a system of encoding onto dimensions three-dimensional information, right?

So a hologram, you have a two-dimensional,

shine the light on, and it creates this illusion of a three-dimensional object, right?

So, in other words, when you have a hologram in just our ordinary experience, you would imagine it's missing information that you might be able to pack if you had not just the restriction to a two-dimensional surface, but you had the whole three-dimensional volume.

You could keep adding much, much more information than the hologram has.

That's not true of a black hole.

If a black, if you keep adding particles, you throw in Robin and Sean after us, Brian, you go in, and the information content of the black hole increases, it grows with the area, not the volume of the black hole.

And that means you cannot stuff in a black hole more information than exists on the boundary.

You just cannot.

It's a mathematical proof.

And then you might begin to wonder, well, maybe this idea that the black hole is a three-dimensional object is as much an illusion as a hologram is an illusion.

that it's three dimensions.

Really, the black hole is the two-dimensional surface, just like the hologram is the two-dimensional surface.

And it's an illusion that it looks like three dimensions.

So then you start to question the entire universe.

Maybe it's an illusion that we live in three dimensions.

Maybe the whole universe is a hologram.

Maybe we're really a two-dimensional projection.

I hear you, but honestly, since lockdown, I am not two-dimensional.

I have eaten so much.

Don't fight against the physics, Matt.

Don't fight against the physics.

You're doing the Christmas lectures this year, aren't you?

I think it's the 18th.

Yes.

Oh,

I would like to say something, which is, Robin, I've known you nearly 30 years, and I know this show's been running for a long time with great success.

Never once have I contacted you to ask to be on it, and that is because I'm an idiot, and I know I'm an idiot.

So, if anybody has been listening to this show and thought, oh, Matt Lucas ruined it, it's actually Robin Ince's fault.

That's all.

Hang on, it was Brian that asked you.

Oh, was it?

Well, Brian.

Brian.

In fact, I got an email from Eric Idol.

So actually, let's blame Eric.

Yes, let's let's blame Eric again, yeah.

Do you know what?

It reminded me, you think of those 30 years when we were talking about delocalised.

I remember doing one particular gig in Plymouth where we've never felt more delocalised than we did that night.

I remember that gig very well, and I wrote about it in my autobiography, and we'll leave it there.

Do you think about it this way?

Now we're back on

happy.

No, I've really enjoyed this show, and I have genuinely learnt some things, and I genuinely apologise for being such a buffoon, but really, it was the only way I could contribute.

Robbins made a career out of it.

Great.

That's it.

I didn't disgrace myself enough.

I have no more business from me.

You have not disgraced yourself at all.

We have one

other, we always ask the audience a question as well.

Obviously, we do this for our social media at the moment as we don't have an audience with us.

And today, we asked our audience, what would you like to see spaghettified in a black hole and why?

And I have the answers here, and hopefully, Brian, you have a few of these answers as well.

I like this one from Kate Collins.

This is a great it says audio of my eight-year-old son talking about Minecraft to see if it would actually be scientifically possible for this to go on any longer.

Bernie says, spaghetti, so that the slurp when I was getting at the end of the strand would go on forever.

So spaghettified spaghetti.

Emma Baines, a strawberry to see if it remains alive at one end and dead at the other.

And I like this one, and because I'm sure that all our listeners and friends in America will agree with this one from Andy Green.

The last four years.

Can I take something?

Can I take something?

Can I take the Premiership trophy just to really annoy Liverpool fans when they actually finally win the league?

We've got

62 Telly says a tooth from the rear of my mouth upon reaching the singularity.

It will be a source of infinite wisdom.

Now we haven't had a pun for a while and this is Radio 4, so well done.

And

Dave Fisher, he is the winner, according to our producer, with his answer, D-Reem, because strings can only get better.

There we are.

This is Radio 4, then.

This is Radio 4.

I thought it was hard.

I thought they were about to play Roman Keating.

Thank you to our guests, Sean Carroll, Jan Eleven, and Matt Lucas.

I was very excited because next week's show is about space archaeology.

It was Brian's suggestion.

I thought this is brilliant.

Finally, we're going to start dealing with who built the canals on Mars, who made the face out of the red sand, about all those alien landing strips that are in the Mojave Desert and other places.

But it turns out he has not been enlightened by Eric von Danikin, despite the number of books I've sent to all about how the gods came down and built the pyramids.

Instead, it's just going to be one of those shows where we talk about how incredible cutting-edge technology has made us have a greater understanding of human civilization.

Sorry.

Thanks, everyone.

Bye.

In the infinite monkey cage.

In the infinite monkey cage.

Turn that nice again.

My name's Louis Theroux and I'm doing a new podcast for Radio 4.

It's called Grounded with Louis Theroux.

I've assembled a series of interviews from my own home.

The idea is that we can dig a little deeper.

peel back the layers and find out who they really are.

A free-flowing exchange exchange of ideas, reflecting on what's going on now, but also looking back at the past.

And featuring, at no extra cost, extraneous family noises in the background and dodgy microphones.

Two people communing through the miracle of the interweb at long distance and yet so very close.

To hear new episodes as soon as they go live, just subscribe to Grounded with Louis Theroux on BBC Sounds.

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