With the Spotify subscription, there are selections of podcasts and audiobooks available for free. I have been listening to several books by Professor Brian Cox.
There is something immensely appealing about this mild mannered Brit who also plays in a rock band. I recently came across a YouTube video of Dr. Cox as a guest on Conan. Brian Cox angered Depok Chopra, by "tweeting some facts", to which Chopra tweeted in reply, "I am going to shove my cosmic consciousness up your ass."
Professor Cox was wearing a suit coat over a t-shirt with an origami unicorn stencil, clearly the unicorn left for Deckard and Rachael at the end of Blade Runner, the greatest science fiction movie of all time.
Brian Cox is also a Professor of Particle Physics, and has written several books. With all of this, you would think Professor Brian Cox is an immensely cool guy, but his appearance on Conan proved beyond a shadow of doubt that he is a (super-intelligent) nerd. I am a serious fan of the Professor! Listening to him explain quantum physics in his Oldham accent just kills me, in a very good way. He says the most outrageous things in the incredible English vernacular.
If you ever need to stretch your imagination, think about these facts:
Our sun converts 600,000,000,000 tons of hydrogen into helium EVERY SECOND! (My emphasis.) It has been doing this since before the earth was formed. It has enough hydrogen for another five billion years.
(31,536,000 seconds per year x 5,000,000,000 years = 1.57680000e+17 on my little calculator - which might mean that the math broke its little chip. There are big number calculators on line, but you get the idea.)
Our sun is 1.4 million kilometers in diameter. A passenger jet would have to fly for six months to circumnavigate it. It is a small star. The largest known stars are thousand of times larger with diameters in the region of a billion kilometers.
The rigidity of matter is something of an illusion, Electron clouds surrounding atomic nuclei keep atoms apart but a sugar cubed-\sized lump of neutron star material would weigh at least one hundred million tons.
September 14, 2015, scientific instruments on earth (LIGO and Virgo Collaboration laboratories) detected gravity waves from a black hole collision/merge 1.3 billion years from earth. The black holes were 29 and 36 times the mass of our sun. They collided and merged in less than 2/10th of a second. During the collision, the peak power output exceeded that of all the stars in the observable universe by a factor of 50. ***
These are numbers and time frames that are inconceivable to our mere human minds. Alright, I am speaking for my own mind here. Unimaginable, but the math is owed to all of our science and physics prior to September 2015.
Where are we headed as a species in this unimaginable, inconceivable universe? What is our purpose (aside from pissing off Depok Chopra)? What the hell is the purpose of black holes?
Black Hole Bonus fact!!
"The idea of objects whose gravity is so intense not even light can escape them is far older. In 1783, an English cleric and amateur scientist named John Michell showed that Newton’s law of gravity suggested such objects could exist. But Michell went further, suggesting that despite being invisible, such objects might reveal themselves if they happened to have a star in orbit about them."
- BBC Science Focus Magazine
***All facts in italics are either direct quotes or paraphrased from: Black Holes - The Key to Understanding the Universe by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw, Published 2022 by HarperCollins
First photo of a black hole, taken by Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration
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