#468 – Janna Levin: Black Holes, Wormholes, Aliens, Paradoxes & Extra Dimensions

The following is a conversation with Jana Levin, a theoretical physicist and cosmologist specializing in black holes, cosmology of extra dimensions, topology of the universe, and gravitational waves in space time. She has also written some incredible books, including how the universe got its spots on the topic of the shape and the size of the universe, a madman dreams of touring machines on the topic of genius, madness, and the limits of knowledge, black hole blues, and other songs from outer space, on the topic of LIGO and the detection of gravitational waves, and black hole survival guide, all about black holes. This was a fun and fascinating conversation. And now a quick few second mention of a sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We've got Brain FM for focus, Better Health for mental health, NetSuite for your business, Shopify for selling stuff, and the AG one for your health. Choose wise of my friends. I do these longer ad reads up in the beginning. I try to make them interesting, but I do also make it super easy to skip with time stamps on screen and in the description. I do, however, try to make them personal, often related to stuff I'm reading or thinking about. Also, if you wanna get in touch with me for whatever reason, go to lexfritman.com/contact. And now onto the full ad reads. Let's go. This episode is brought to you by brain.fm, a platform that offers music specially made for focus. And when I say music, I mean audio experience. If you ever see me out in the wild, like a Starbucks, I'm usually either writing or programming deeply in focus with headphones. In those headphones are layers of audio, a mixture of some noise, beats, rain, layers. Many layers that help me deeply, deeply, deeply focus. Speaking of audio, did you know that the Roman Empire used synchronized war drums to coordinate legions? Just imagine the sound of those drums. I need to do a lot more episodes on ancient Rome, on ancient Greece, on ancient China. Anyway, I'm not listening to war drums. I'm listening to Brain FM, but I'm focusing. You too can increase your focus and try brain.fm free for thirty days by going to brain.fm/lex. That's brain.fm/lex for thirty days free. This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled h e l p help. It's raining outside. Thunderstorms, like somebody's knocking on the window. If that's not a metaphor for prodding the subconscious mind, I don't know what is. Alan Turing comes up in this episode. He was crucial in the whole code breaking effort in World War two. I should probably do an episode on that. His work, his person, his mind has been a presence in my life. What an incredible human being. But anyway, I think of, the human mind, the conscious and the subconscious is a kind of code, and, therapy is …