Sean Carroll

And the great thing was, you know, if you think of the number of different apparent phenomena in the world that we now think of as electricity and magnetism in action, right?

Heat, light, radio waves, x-rays, you know, the magnets, all this stuff, like very, very different things, all explained in just two fields talking to each other, electricity and magnetism.

basically yeah and that's this is why writing books is good because you write a book and you say like you you point your remote control your tv and a radio wave comes out and turns it on and you get many emails saying that's an infrared wave not a radio wave you don't know what you're talking about but they're all different manifestations of electromagnetism and so no no wait wait but my cell phone is not your cell phone is not but your remote control is yeah that's for sure yeah

Yeah, exactly.

Who knows these things?

I can't keep track of these things.

I'm just a theoretical physicist.

Basically everything is the electromagnetic field.

Other than gravity, it's all electromagnetism all the way down.

We live it.

We just live it.

There's a hugely important philosophy of science lesson here, because like Neil said, you can't see the electric field or the magnetic field, but they're clearly everywhere.

Like we have equations that describe them exactly and make predictions and fit all the data.

Therefore, we accept that they are there.

You don't need to see them with your eyes to have evidence that they're part of reality.

It's something that I've worried about for decades, and honestly... Really?

Yeah, well, so here's the question.

There's two things that we think are true about a black hole.

One is, if you're standing very far away...

And you look at the black hole, Stephen Hawking says, black holes give off radiation.