Andrew Strominger: Black Holes, Quantum Gravity, and Theoretical Physics | Lex Fridman Podcast #359

I am like a falling star who has finally found her place next to another in a lovely constellation, where we will sparkle in the heavens forever.

Best intro to your podcast ever. Like WTF, I wanna hear more..

the least amount of time was spent on the time subject lol

Wonderful episode Lex. Andy's laugh and his palpable sense of joy and enthusiasm, are all so infectious and inspiring. What a lovely, brilliant, and humble human being. The hall of mirrors analogy in the photon rings section was pure genius. 🖤

This all seems tangible in conversation until you start asking...where does mass comes from and why? The psychology of "trust"; does this parallel the theological expertise of a preacher? Without "artists", none of this would be palatable. Books with pictures, diagrams, art...sometimes the mind can get carried away with the idea of REAL...when your context of proof in conversation is impossible...like recounting historical events.

How can this guy, with a straight face, tell us that we know what light is. That’s ridiculous, they have no clue

There are no black holes

dirac medal for string theory, breakthrough prize, this is a brilliant, humble and peaceful person, kids should look up to this guy instead of rich athletes

It's hard to believe the singularity of black holes.

His first comments were flawed

String theory is a fruitless.

"light is that stuff that disappears when the lights go off" - this is some Forrest Gump level of wisdom :-)

This guy talking half an hour about light and never mentioned the word „photon“

Hi Lex, me again. You'll certainly hate me but dude... I understand that you may sometimes ask poetical questions with no real intellectual value. You're a poetic guy and that's ok. To me, it has few value but for you, and certainly many others, it does. So I'm not criticizing. I'm just mentioning it to put it in contrast with the fact that the guy says space and time are illusions and.... Nothing? How can you not ask him to elaborate on such a radical and counterintuitive statement ??? It baffles me...
I know you won't answer me and that's a shame...

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Lex, please think of your audience, from time to time. We're not all high-level astro-physicists.
What the F's information got to do with black holes?? What does he mean? For us, mere mortals, information is what I store on a hard drive. It's bits. Why would a black hole store information? What kind of information?

The photon is stretched to the point like an elastic band it finally snaps the reaction sends it even faster down the black hole and some energy is emitted back out.

I always thought since energy will never be destroyed, black holes have to break things down to their smallest point. So small we can’t see it. A buildup of everything it absorbed with points so infinitely small light reflects off of it. Everything is everything. In different forms.

So the event horizon is a black hole . The point wear light can't come back faster then it moves away

At the end of the universe we all meet. With everything else.

This guy has the energy of a black hole. Thank god I don’t have to sit through a class he’s teaching.

the past is a wake from the present. the past does not make the present

So Quantum theory are the formulas that make up the areas that the mass, time and gravity formulas of Einstein's Relativity theory do not cover or when we observe exceptions in nature?

Actually, the escape velocity from the Moon is not 7.0 km/s as Strominger states,
but only 2.38 km/s, which makes sense - the Moon has only 1/6 the mass of the Earth,
which has an escape velocity of 11.2 km/s.

I am dismayed that the audience listening to this podcast have not picked up on this...

Suppose, I have one of Elon Musk's Neuralinks. Its connected to my cell phone which is connected to the internet. I have been hiered to read the words on a heads up display. I don't know what year this is.

It's not turtles, it's holographic plates all the way down.

I was under the impression that Kurt Godel proved there cannot be a theory of everything. There will always be unanswerable questions within the system and there will always be need of people to construct the next shell.

So there is a plate factory in the black holes. It gets materials from suppliers of plate material and hologram sensitive checmical suppliers. I get it.

Bunch of false claims with zero evidence

Where is Thomas Mournblade?

The way you stay out of a black hole is to grab hold of space. The fabric of space cannot exist within a black hole because the energy inside displaces it.

You can wind space around something if it's rotating fast enough. If i can get my hands on the lasers I will prove it 🎉

Oh yes it's that one guy that shaved for the interview. I have his poster on my ceiling in my bedroom. Haha. Now that's weird and funny to me thought I'd share. Hope nobody ever reads this though.

I think he danced around the question what is light 🤷 light is simple . Electricity, energy 👀

this should've been of 20 hours.

It’s somewhat bizarre to say Prof Sean Carrol likes to stand against philosophers, being him the one to say that “there’s nothing after death because we measured everything and did not find a clue”. I think his mind is so bright that he cannot see that instruments evolve in precision and we may still not have one yet able to detect any kind of “anomaly” not considered by the actual state of physics and science in general. It’s not funny, it’s kind of sad, actually.

thank you for sharing these incredible stories.

It was a beautiful thing, a precious moment in time, to witness the admiration you have for each other and your work respectively. Magic and easily the cherry atop the icing of another well-baked interview.

I love guests like this.

Water with salt and pepper and the addition of dawn dish soap the pepper scatters to the edge of the universe if that universe is a container

So where do barnacles come into the equation? Im not a scientist, but im a psychic of some kind, and the barnacle has been foreshadowing all day today and its time is now

Is that speed of light an enforceable limit? Or is that only the speed that has been documented by the scientific community

Fantastic interview. Thanks to both of you.

man we really dont know sheet

Hypothetically, if there were things in the universe before the big bang, it would be impossible to detect them because that information would have been overwritten and scattered by the massive explosion. Science will only accept what can be proven and information like that would be exempt from being proven. It's not provable if a universe existed before the big bang and was obliterated by the largest explosion ever conceived. That's why I believe trying to understand or state with authority that there was nothing before the big bang is a fools errand.

this is the best podcast

I wonder if reading the Upanishads would be helpful to you guys.