Brian Cox
speaker
1,719 appearances
13 recordings
8 series
first heard Oct 2024
last heard 16 Jun
Brian Cox’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 9 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 3.
Appearances
But one way is that this weird place, this point of no return in space that you can fall through, but it's a point of no return. It sort of shakes. It almost disrupts the vacuum of space and sort of almost shakes particles out of the vacuum. That's one way of thinking about it. But this radiation is coming from the vacuum. It's coming from empty space.
Whereas if you think about the thing that I throw in, if I throw this notepad into the thing, then that goes to the singularity. It's got nothing to do, the radiation's got nothing to do with this thing. This thing is not set on fire or something like that. It's gone to the end of time and just whatever's happened to it has happened to it.
So this radiation has got nothing to do with having anything that falls in at first sight, at least. And so that was the paradox. It's called the black hole information paradox. One way to put it is the laws of nature that we use to calculate what happens tell us that information is never destroyed. And when you calculate what happens, it tells us that information is destroyed.
So that's why everyone got interested in it in the 80s, because it's interesting.
Yeah, something like that. There's occasionally a galaxy. I think one was discovered where we said maybe we can't see evidence of a black hole.
Well... So I think I'm right in saying we don't fully understand why all galaxies, as you said, maybe there's an exception, but all galaxies have a black hole, a supermassive black hole in the center. It's obviously got something to do with the way they form. And one of the purposes, by the way, of the James Webb Space Telescope is to try to look at the formation of the first galaxies.
So that's one of the reasons that telescope is up there. So it's cutting-edge research. We're trying to understand how the galaxies form. But clearly, you're right, that it has something to do with the way the galaxies form in the early universe. And it's pulling in stars. Well, they... They do pull in material. Right. But if you've got stuff orbiting around them, it stays orbiting around it. Oh.
So the way we first detected the one in the Milky Way, because that image is very new that we have of it, is the stars orbiting it very close to it. They call the S stars that whiz around in these orbits very close to the black hole.
It'd be so cool. I'd love to see one.
Yeah, did you see it?
Did you get this? Because I saw one in India. And I got this feeling that I was living on a ball of rock. Right. And it must have been just because the night just falls. Right. And suddenly you see the universe comes much more quickly. Yeah.
Yeah, because, you know, these questions we have about our place. And as you said, it can be easy to be myopic, can't it? You said if you look at our screens, it's Earth that we think about at most. And most of us don't really think about Earth. You think about your country or your city or your town. Or your neighborhood. Yeah, even think about the Earth. But you're right.
If you know, when you look at that arc of stars, and as you said, when you see it in a truly dark sky, it's powerful. It's incredible. 400 billion suns, give or take. 400,000 million suns. That's just words. You know what I'm saying? It's impossible to picture.
It's so abstract. And most of them, I think the best guess would be all of them have planets. So pretty much. So you're talking about trillions of planets.
No, I mean, the thing is, there's a thing called the Fermi paradox. Yes. Which I think we talked about before on the show. Yes. And the paradox is that if we haven't seen it, let's assume we haven't seen any evidence of anything. That's a paradox because, as I said, we now know. We didn't when Fermi first posed it, by the way. We now know there are so many planets out there.
So let's say trillions of planets in the Milky Way. The Milky Way has been there for over 13 billion years, pretty much the age of the universe. Yes. So if there's no one else out there, then the question is why? Because there's been so much time and so many places for civilizations to become space-faring civilizations. Right. As Elon talks about, multi-planetary civilization.
We're very close to becoming a multi-planetary civilization. And once you have become a multi-planetary and multi-stellar civilization, if you become that, you're immortal, basically, essentially. So the question is, the paradox is, why does it appear nobody has done that? So the first thing to say is, I would not be surprised if a UFO landed here now in the parking lot.
I'd actually, not only would I not be surprised, I'd be relieved, actually. I'd be like... This is good because it would be a weight off my shoulders because I'm worried that we're the only ones. That's a terrifying scenario. And we're going to make a mess of it. Yeah. And so I'm worried that we could talk about that.
So if you think about it, let's assume. So we didn't finish the UAP thing. Yeah, we'll get to that. So I don't know about that. But anyway, let's assume just for the purposes of this that we're the only ones in our galaxy, let's say.
Then I would argue... So there's a question I ask in these live shows that I do. I start with a question which is kind of a joke in a way, which is what does it mean to live a finite, fragile life in an infinite, eternal universe? Which is a good question, right? That's what you're asking, right? What does it mean to live a finite life? The first thing to say is meaning, right? What does it mean?
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