The Schwarzschild Radius

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John Wheeler was very worried about these things, and the worry came particularly to a head when Martin Schmidt concluded that this was the first quasar. The signals from this object were redshifted, so that meant probably it was receding from us at a very great speed. And thirdly, it had variations in its brightness of the order of a week or so, which suggested that it couldn't be much bigger than the solar system. So they thought this was an artifact, there's maybe some special thing, but it's not usually what you'd expect.

Sir Roger Penrose has had a remarkable life. He has contributed an enormous amount to our understanding of general relativity, perhaps more than anyone since Einstein himself -- Penrose diagrams, singularity theorems, the Penrose process, cosmic censorship, and the list goes on. He has made important contributions to mathematics, including such fun ideas as the Penrose triangle and aperiodic tilings. He has also made bold conjectures in the notoriously contentious areas of quantum mechanics and the study of consciousness. In his spare time he's managed to become an extremely successful author, writing such books as The Emperor's New Mind and The Road to Reality. With far too much that we could have talked about, we decided to concentrate in this discussion on spacetime, black holes, and cosmology, but we made sure to reserve some time to dig into quantum mechanics and the brain by the end. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.