David Kaiser: MIT Physicist on Black Holes Older Than the Universe
episodePreviously titled “MIT Physicist: These Black Holes Are Older Than the Universe” — renamed by the publisher on Aug 3, 2026
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What are primordial black holes and how could they have formed before stars?
Today we have something different for the audience of theories of everything and I'm I'm super excited to speak about it. I'm going to get into exactly why today's episode is different, but I'll ask this preliminary question and perhaps in your answer it'll be clear which direction we're going. Uh-huh. But what are primordial black holes and why should anyone care?
Good. Okay. So primordal black holes are as yet hypothetical. We don't know they exist, but they're a really intriguing idea, and they're they were put forward by a few different researchers more than half a century ago. So the idea is has has a long history by now. The idea in brief, and I'm sure we can unpack it um together soon. Is that these are black holes that would have formed not through the ordinary route, by having a star that exhausts its nuclear fuel, gravity winds, it collapses and crushes down and and forms what we now call an astrophysical or stellar collapse black hole. And we now know those are real and they litter the universe. They're very common, in fact, these um stellar collapse or astrophysical black holes.
These primordial black holes are hypothesized to follow a different route, that they would actually short circuit all of stellar evolution, and they would form by the direct collapse of some original early universe or primordial lumpiness, some inhomogeneity in the distribution of matter and energy. Which is different from saying you had a star and it collapsed had a whole life cycle and collapse. So these things could form not only independent of stars, but long, long before there existed stars, in fact, before there existed stable atoms. So these really have a very, very different history if they exist in our cosmos. And so we can unpack that and talk about it some more. But one among many reasons why they're now of interest to a growing number of researchers across
and of fundamental physics and astronomy and cosmology. is because these might be a um a candidate, for example, for dark matter. Uh if they have certain masses and properties, we can talk about that. If they form with larger masses, then they might be candidates that could explain these supermassive black holes that we now know lurk within pretty much every galaxy that's been seen. So we've lots of questions about the cosmos, and primary black holes seem to offer a pretty cool way to to maybe start to answer some of those really longstanding mysteries.
Broadly speaking, there are these two ways of learning large swaths of material and connecting them together. So one is to learn everything, like the everything that's in the term theory of everything or this channel's name.
Could primordial black holes account for dark matter in the universe?
However, it's difficult to do so in a manner that's more than, say, three or four layers deep on any given subject just due to time constraints. Now the next method is to paradoxically specialize in one tiny domain. domain and then do that extremely well. And this sounds counter to the whole spirit of the wide scope of everything. But to learn that one specific topic, you have to then approach it from multiple angles. I don't know if you've played this game Katamari or if you've heard of it. I don't know it. No. Okay. So in Katamari, you're this tiny little figure that then pushes one special object. It's small. There's a stickiness to it. So you start to get some small bits of paper attached to it, maybe some toothpicks, and then eventually a glass bottle, and then eventually cows and billions.
buildings. So when I talked to you initially we were going to speak about the history of physics and we still will touch on that later on in this conversation. Yeah. But speaking off air, it was clear that you used primordial black holes as this sort of subject that touches every other area related to fundamental physics. And I don't think you intended it to be as such. So I want this episode to not be an expl to not only be an exploration of primordial black holes. And and not only every other area of fundamental physics or as much as we can touch, but also of this generic process of having a topic that allows one to become both a a jack of all trades and a master of some.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What are primordial black holes and how could they have formed before stars?
0:00–2:35
2
Could primordial black holes account for dark matter in the universe?
2:35–16:21
3
How does cosmic inflation relate to the creation of primordial black holes?
16:21–21:12
4
What is the difference between direct‑collapse and stellar‑collapse black holes?
21:12–49:06
5
How does Bell’s theorem connect to cosmology through cosmic‑Bell tests?
49:06–54:32
6
Why are distant quasars used in cosmic‑Bell experiments?
54:32–1:09:04
7
How do scalar fields and inflationary models influence primordial black‑hole formation?
1:09:04–1:18:26
8
What are the prospects for detecting primordial black holes locally and in astrophysical observations?
1:18:26–1:48:31
Speakers
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