Podcaster: Paul M. Sutter
Title: AaS! 246: What is Stephen Hawking’s Legacy?
Organization: INFN Trieste and OSU CCAPP
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Description:
How do you measure the impact of a scientist? Does Stephen Hawking compare to Newton or Einstein? What were his contributions to black holes, the big bang, and quantum gravity? I discuss these questions and more in today’s Ask a Spaceman!
Bio: Paul Sutter received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as a Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellow. He then spent three years as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Next-Generation Cosmic Probes at the Paris Institute of Astrophysics, and is currently an INFN Fellow in Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy, and a Visiting Scholar at the Ohio State University’s Center for Cosmology and Astro-Particle Physics. He is inexplicably drawn to positions with very long titles.
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Transcript:
How do you rank a scientist? Like, if you were to make a list of top 10 scientists of all time, how would you start categorizing them? What metric would you use?
How do you score them and award points? Well, my perspective is to measure their change. And here’s a little bit of physics nerd trivia for you, just because I know how much you love this.
When we measure change in physics, we use the Greek letter delta, and specifically capital delta for big changes, and then little delta for little changes. But delta is the term we use to measure change or to quantify change. So my perspective to rank a scientist to measure the impact of a scientist is to measure their delta.
And so in this concept, scientists who create a bigger delta are the most significant because they change the most. And with this measure, it’s easy to see how the greats came to be the greats. Newton changed our understanding of motion itself.
And then he changed our understanding of gravity and made it universal. Those are big changes. That’s a big delta.
Einstein unified space and time. He kick-started quantum mechanics. He gave us a new, fresh perspective on gravity, which birthed gravitational waves and black holes and the Big Bang itself.
That’s a huge delta. Most scientists create only very small deltas. They only change one little bit of their field.
And yes, I’m including myself in that. In other words, if those scientists hadn’t existed, then their field of research wouldn’t look much different. Not that their work isn’t important, but it’s just a small delta.
And multiple scientists working over generations, all their small deltas can add up to a big capital delta. But today’s episode isn’t about Newton or Einstein, or indeed the vast majority of scientists. It’s about one scientist in particular, Stephen Hawking.
And we want to know his legacy, his impact, his change, his delta. We want to measure how our understanding of the universe is different now, thanks to his contributions in the past. Another way to phrase this is to ask, if he hadn’t ever existed, what would have been the same?
Or what would have been figured out already? What would change? What did change because of Hawking’s contributions?
Full disclosure, I never met Hawking personally. One time I sat at his desk at the Perimeter Institute in Canada. I was there giving a talk.
And Stephen Hawking is one of the founding members, very important. He also was never there. So they used his office as the visitor’s office.
So that’s where I sat. So I sat in a room labeled S. Hawking.
That was kind of cool. I also never collaborated with him or directly cited his work in any of my own papers. My own research lines were not that closely connected to Stephen Hawking’s work.
But that said, it’s hard to ignore. Even when I was working in a completely different field and not directly citing him, I could not ignore his contributions to the field. I could not ignore his delta or the delta that he left behind.
The things that we know because of him and that if he had not existed, we probably would not have figured out. First off, he wrote over 200 papers. That’s a lot of papers.
That alone adds up to an enormous delta, especially in physics. It’s just hard to write that many papers. And even if each paper is just only a little bit impactful, has only a little delta, then over the course of an entire career, then it can all add up and shape an entire field if you simply output that many papers.
And in Hawking’s case, it wasn’t just one field, it was multiple fields. I’m going to say up front that with this ranking, with this idea of measuring a scientist’s delta, that Hawking doesn’t rise up to the likes of Newton or Einstein. He made huge contributions for sure and has a lasting legacy for sure.
But his work didn’t trigger a fundamental restructuring of our basic view of the universe like the way Newton or Einstein did.
[Speaker 2]
Now, to be fair, maybe we have to grade him on a curve. Maybe Newton and Einstein solved the easy problems, the low-hanging fruit.
[Speaker 1]
And then all that’s left is the hard problem so that no physicist can rise to that level because simply the big changes in physics have already been made and now it’s just a bunch of small changes over the course of decades, if not centuries. And so maybe we’ll never have someone as impactful as a Newton or Einstein ever again. I don’t think so.
But that’s an argument to be made and you can make that in that if I’m going to rank someone like Stephen Hawking against someone like Newton, then I need to grade on a curve and I need to adjust all that. Okay, that’s fair. But in an absolute sense, with no curving of the grade here, Hawking does not rise up to Newton or Einstein.
But that’s okay. That’s a pretty high bar. And that doesn’t mean that Hawking’s legacy wasn’t important.
My personal assessment after browsing through his 200 plus papers is that this is a man who pushed gravity to the extreme. This is a man who is very deeply, deeply interested in the nature of gravity and the nature of special and the nature of general relativity. And he wanted to see how far it could take him.
Now he did do work in quantum field theory, in some unified theories, in some string theory. He worked in cosmology. We’re going to visit all of that.
He was certainly aware of the other fields of physics and incorporated them as necessary. But I feel like after browsing those 200 papers, he was interested in gravity. And he was interested in seeing the most extreme expressions of gravity.
He was interested in seeing how far an understanding of gravity could take us. He was interested in seeing what gravity could teach us. What new corners of the universe are we able to explore if we take relativity and gravity and just push it, just push it as far as it can.
He wanted to see what surprises are in store when we let gravity be gravity at its most extreme scale, at its most extreme strength, and at its most extreme environment. And that led him to work in three broad categories. And these categories are my own.
Just after browsing 200 plus papers, I start to see little patterns and I start to see little groupings. And all these groupings have a unified theme of gravity at its most extreme. And where is gravity its most extreme?
It’s its most extreme at black holes, at the Big Bang, and at quantum levels. And those are the three broad categories. There’s a lot of intersection, of course.
When we start asking questions about the extremely early Big Bang, we are asking questions about quantum gravity. When we’re probing and trying to develop a theory of quantum gravity, we’re trying to answer questions about black holes. There’s a lot of overlap, but I see these three themes cropping up again and again and again in his papers.
So let’s visit all three. The first is, of course, black holes, the strongest source of gravity in the universe. You want to know where gravity is extreme?
It’s extreme in black holes. That’s it. They’re right there and they’re places you can point to.
You point your finger up in the sky like there’s a black hole there, there’s a source, there’s a place of infinite gravity right there. I can go visit it if I try it hard enough. So of course, physicists like Hawking, who are interested in the extreme nature of gravity, are going to be fascinated by black holes.
His largest contribution here is a topic we’ve met many times in this show, and that is the discovery of Hawking radiation. This is a huge deal. Hawking radiation is still an important thing, even 50 years after its discovery.
It still hangs over any discussion of gravity, any discussion of black holes, any discussion of quantum gravity. Hawking radiation, the discovery that black holes aren’t entirely black, the discovery that they slowly leak radiation and particles. This is a surprising result.
This is a result nobody expected, and he figured it out, and he did it through an application. He was trying to reconcile quantum mechanics with gravity. Like I said, there’s a lot of intersections here in any of these three topics, but there are these three locations where Hawking is studying gravity.
One of those is black holes, and he’s asking, wait a minute, what does gravity actually do at the event horizon of a black hole? What does it actually do at the surface, at the minute sub-microscopic scale right there on the edge of the event horizon? What is gravity doing?
Well, to answer that question, you have to bring in some quantum mechanics knowledge because you’re starting to deal with small scales, and once you do, you get this surprising interaction between quantum fields and the event horizon where black holes aren’t entirely black. That is something we are still grappling with today, but that wasn’t his only contribution to black holes. He started the conversation in general about black hole thermodynamics, this crazy, crazy statement, series of statements where you take the laws of thermodynamics, things like entropy and heat flow, good old stuff from the 1800s when we were figuring out how steam engines worked, and you can import that language to describe black holes, these sources of ultimate gravity.
You can use the same language. You can use the language of entropy related to not a steam engine but the surface area of a black hole. That’s weird.
That’s gravity at its most extreme. We are still wrestling with that. Many other people would continue that line of thought like Jacob Bekenstein, a friend slash rival, frenemy of Hawking, deserves his own show, but this weird concept that black holes can be described by thermodynamics, we are still wrestling with that because that seems odd, and it seems like a clue that maybe gravity itself can be described using the language of thermodynamics.
That is something we are still unpacking in the form of various holographic principles. It from Bit. Oh yeah, ask me about It from Bit and John Wheeler’s ideas.
Feel free to ask. I’d love to dive into that. Anyway, Hawking is there finding this surprising connection.
He also went really far despite all that to demonstrate the no hair theorem. This is the concept that black holes in pure relativity contain essentially no information. You can describe them by their charge, their mass, and their spin, and that’s it.
They have no hair, no extra information on top of them. He was able to use that as an anchor point and say, okay, general relativity says black holes have no information, no extra information. You throw a bunch of books into a black hole, you throw a bunch of cats into another black hole, and they look the same.
No offense to cats or books, but then you start folding in quantum mechanics. You find all these surprising realizations that don’t add up, that don’t reconcile with the no hair theorem. He also took gravity to another extreme place, the Big Bang, the earliest source of gravity in the universe.
He developed a proof that general relativity demands a singularity at the Big Bang. He was friends with Roger Penrose who had developed this when it comes to black holes and proved that, hey, if you’re in a universe governed by general relativity, there must be singularities at the center of black holes. You can’t escape it.
Mathematically, I mean, we can’t escape black holes. We already know that. But they are an inevitable conclusion of general relativity.
It’s not an easy proof to do. Hawking took that idea and turned it to a proof that, hey, if we live in a universe governed by general relativity, there must be a singularity at the Big Bang, which means you must go beyond relativity. If you want to understand the origins of the universe, you can’t escape it.
You will never find an answer in general relativity. That’s what Hawking discovered. He made major contributions to inflation theory.
He didn’t invent inflation theory. That credit goes to Alan Guth, the man. He took it and ran with it.
He made major contributions to how inflation worked, about what might have powered it, how phase transitions work in that kind of extreme environment. At the intersection of quantum fields and gravity again, he would come back to this intersection again and again and again. He would do it at black holes.
He would do it in the Big Bang. He would figure out, he would play a major role in fleshing out inflation theory, in creating what we now understand to be inflation theory. He proposed primordial black holes, this radical idea that the conditions of the early universe were so extreme that they created a tremendous population of tiny black holes that might survive to the present day and might explain the dark matter.
It’s largely ruled out, but the search continues, and it gave us lots of food for thought. He was very concerned with the quantum nature of the universe slash multiverse. He did a lot of work on the multiverse, as in, how do we take the language of quantum mechanics?
How do we take things like wave functions and apply them to the whole entire universe? Does that even make sense? He started probing.
He started asking about the origins of the universe. Yeah, he proved that you can’t avoid the singularity. Oh, but that’s in general relativity.
How do we go beyond general relativity? How do we push gravity to the extreme? What do we learn?
Do we get to learn that we live in a multiverse? Do we get to learn about the origins of the cosmos? He had a lot of interest in wormholes and time travel, bending space-time into extreme configurations, seeing what that makes, and then bringing up very important points about the relationship between wormholes and time travel.
He created the chronology protection conjecture, which is quite a mouthful, but it says, essentially, that time travel into the past is forbidden because the past has already happened. You will never, ever build a time machine. They are forbidden by nature because the past is locked.
It’s protected. Now, that’s just a conjecture. It’s up to us to come up with a physical theory that can explain that conjecture, that we can derive that conjecture from.
Say, oh, yeah, time travel into the past is forbidden because fill in the blanks. Hawking spent a lot of time attempting to fill in the blanks. Is there a way to have the impossibility of time travel baked into physics itself?
Is it possible to have that be a conclusion of our loss of physics? Hawking worked a lot in that direction. Then through this all, and then also sometimes just standing on the side in its own set of papers, was quantum gravity.
Strong gravity at small scale. Something that general relativity cannot cope with. Something that our naive attempts to marry quantum mechanics with general relativity can’t cope with.
When we try to take the language of quantum mechanics, the tools we have to explain the electromagnetic force and the strong force and the weak force, when we apply it to gravity, it all just falls apart. Hawking tried to make it not fall apart. He tried to find ways to make it work.
Unlike many of his colleagues, he was not particularly interested in developing a theory of everything, where all of physics can be explained by a single set of equations. He was interested, for sure, in the intersection of quantum mechanics and general relativity. He was interested in quantum gravity.
But that was the extent of it. Yeah, he was totally aware of string theory. He wrote some papers connecting some of his work to string theory.
Then some of his results actually influenced the trajectory of string theory, even though he didn’t work on string theory. He never seemed particularly interested in string theory. He was interested in quantum gravity, period, and taking general relativity as we know it, and taking quantum mechanics as we know it.
Instead of just pushing it all to the side and creating a new thing like string theory tries to do, say, hey, wait a minute, maybe there is a way to make this relationship work. We see an example of this line of thinking with Hawking radiation. Hawking radiation is an attempt to connect quantum mechanics or tools, language, worldview of quantum mechanics with an extreme condition of gravity, the gravity at the event horizon of a black hole.
And you get a surprising result. No string theory required, no theory of everything required, just taking what we already know and finding a surprising result at that intersection, at quantum gravity. Now, because he created that result, because he created Hawking radiation, it gives more work to do, more juice for a theory of everything.
If you come up with a string theory, if you come up with a theory of everything, not only do you have to explain the orbit of Mercury or whatever, and the behavior of some atomic particles in a metal or whatever, you now also have to explain Hawking radiation. And he found that that Hawking radiation opened up a gigantic, gigantic can of worms, a paradox that has lasted for more than half a century, that is the information paradox. Information goes into a black hole, Hawking radiation happens, but Hawking radiation by its very nature doesn’t contain any information.
It looks more like thermodynamics, which doesn’t have a lot of information associated with it. It’s just blank radiation. No information comes out of the black hole, the black hole disappears.
Where did the information go? We like information because it’s how we preserve physical knowledge from step to step as it advances in time. So if you can create or destroy information, then all of physics kind of, like, dissolves.
That seems bad. Right there. A surprising result at the intersection of quantum mechanics and gravity, pushing gravity to the extreme.
And you get a surprising result and a troubling result. The paradox stands today. Any theory of everything, any string theory, must resolve the information paradox.
Because if you come up with a theory, no matter how shiny, no matter how fancy, new jargon, new entities in the universe, whatever, if you can’t explain the information paradox, you’re dead on arrival. You know how many times in this show I’ve said, well, you know, that’s another thing we’ll have to figure out once we get a working quantum theory of gravity. Yeah, a good chunk of that list of problems is due to Hawking’s work, which doesn’t sound like a big delta, a big change, but it is because it gave us a window into the quantum gravity world.
Without Hawking, you just have, well, quantum mechanics and general relativity are incompatible. All the results are nonsense. But Hawking refused to allow that to be true.
I mean, he’s like, yeah, it’s nonsense with a naive application. Maybe we need to be a bit more clever about it. So let’s see.
Let’s see if anything interesting pops up once we’re a little bit more clever. Let’s tweak the theory here. Let’s make an approximation here.
Let’s use a mathematical term over here and bring it over here and, you know, and then out pops these surprising results like Hawking radiation, like wormholes, like inflation, like the information paradox. Clues into the quantum gravity world that we would not have had without Hawking. That’s a big change.
He didn’t solve quantum gravity, but he found clever intersections and surprising results that now we know we have to solve. We have a view into the quantum gravity world that Hawking gave to us that we wouldn’t have had before. What does this all add up to?
Well, I just breezed through over four decades of a scientist’s career as expressed in 200 plus papers, and I could spend a whole series, series of episodes doing this again, but in more detail. So feel free to ask. And it’s really fun to see his work evolve and see what topics drew his interest.
You know, look at the papers from the 1960s and then compare those to the papers in the 1980s and then the papers in the 2000s just before his death. It’s interesting to see what topics drew his interest. What starts as a little side digression here, like there’s a string of papers on one topic.
You see one little side digression, like, okay, he got picked up on that, wrote a little paper on that, and then he puts it away for a couple of years, and then all of a sudden, it blossoms and he spends like two years straight cranking out a dozen papers on this one topic. You could see him attacking it from different angles and uncovering it and exploring it and saying, well, what about this? What if we change this?
What if we do this? Well, what does this imply? What does this mean?
How does that connect over here to string theory? And then it fades away as he picks up another topic and then, blam, out of nowhere, 15 years later, he returns to the topic because he has some new insight based on what he’s been working on for a decade. He’s like, oh yeah, now that I have this insight because I figured out this, I’m going to bring it back over here and we’re going to revisit this topic.
It’s fascinating and it’s fun. You can really see the trajectory of his mind preserved in his publication record. You know, it’s kind of like an actor.
They may have a few standout roles, even an Academy Award or two, but part of their accomplishment, part of their impact is also their volume. Movie after movie of solid performance, contributing to the final product in their own way, even if only some of their work rose to the level of making them a household name. Like, there’s some famous actors who are household names for just one or two roles, but then if you dig into their IMDB page and look at their body of work, you can see just how vast and impressive it is.
You might have a favorite actor and if you know they’re going to be in a movie, you’re going to see it. You don’t care what the movie’s about. You don’t care who directed it, but if your favorite actor is in a movie and you hear it, you’re going to go see it because you know they’re going to deliver and you will enjoy seeing your favorite actor in that movie.
For decades, if you saw S. Hawking on the top of a movie, as you skipped the abstract, you just started reading. If you saw his name on his paper, because you knew it was going to be interesting, you knew it was going to be boundary pushing, you knew it was going to be insightful.
To give you a measure of just how important his contributions were, consider the Nobel Prizes, you know, generally recognized to be a major indicator of Delta. The Nobel Prize in Physics in 2019, just a year after Hawking passed, was awarded, quote, for contributions to our understanding of the evolution of the universe and Earth’s place in the cosmos, with one half to James Peebles, quote, for theoretical discoveries in physical cosmology. The other half went to exoplanet researchers, you know, weird kind of mashup that year, but okay.
Hawking could have been a contender for that prize. Instead of splitting it between exoplanet researchers and cosmologists, James Peebles, it could have been Jim and Steven, and then one of the exoplanet guys, or none of the exoplanet guys. They would have got their own year.
It would have just been Jim and Steven. He could have been a contender. Jim and Steven were frequent collaborators in studying the nature of the early universe of inflation, of the Big Bang, of exploring how gravity worked in that extreme environment of the early universe, and fleshing out modern cosmology as a serious scientific field, more than just like, oh, look, there’s the cosmic microwave background.
That’s pretty cool. I guess the Bing Bangers, right? To something that can make robust predictions about, say, the evolution of galaxies.
Hawking did a lot of that work. He collaborated with Peebles a lot. They could have shared that prize.
The Nobel Prize in Physics in 2020, just a year later, was one half awarded to Roger Penrose, quote, for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity. Hawking could have been a contender here. Roger and Steven were frequent collaborators.
They were friends. They wrote a lot of papers together. They bounced ideas off of each other a lot.
Roger Penrose came up with the idea that general relativity mandates the existence of singularities of black holes. Hawking took that and applied it to the Big Bang. Then Hawking took around and started working on black holes, came up with the information paradox.
He was a contender here. He did a lot of work on solidifying the existence, the reality of black holes, like the no hair theorem. He was a major part of that.
He was a contender for this prize, either solo or with Roger Penrose. He could have done it. Let that sink in.
Hawking had a decent chance. I have no idea. I’m not a member of the Nobel Prize selection committee, never have been.
I don’t know their deliberations. I don’t know what they thought or what they were thinking in 2016, 2017, 2018 before Hawking died. I don’t know.
But it’s reasonable to argue that he could have been a contender. He could have been a contender for two prizes, for two separate awards of the Nobel Prize. Honestly, all of his work on quantum gravity, it didn’t pan out.
Hawking was not able to develop a quantum theory of gravity. He had plenty of ideas. He had his own pet theories that he was working on something called N8 supergravity.
It didn’t pan out. It didn’t work. But he gave it a shot and it’s possible.
There’s a universe where it did work, where he did crack quantum gravity, not a theory of everything, but a quantized theory of gravity, a theory that could describe what gravity does at extremely small scales, what happens at the event horizon, what happens at this black hole singularity, what happens at the Big Bang singularity. He could have done it. If that panned out, yeah, he’d get a prize for that, for unlocking that corner of the universe.
He had three broad categories in his research. Two of those categories had Nobel Prizes awarded to people he collaborated with. And one of those, if it had actually worked, and he had, I mean, if it actually worked, honestly, he would be considered right up there with Newton or Einstein for radically reshaping our understanding of the universe.
He’d be right there. But it didn’t work out. That just happens.
No matter how you slice it, Hawking’s legacy is pretty intense. Oh, wait, what’s that? Oh, that’s a bonus round.
There’s a fourth category, which is science outreach. His book, 1988, A Brief History of Time, was huge. One, it had a great title.
What a clever, witty title. Had a very interesting person behind it, a kind of person that most people have never met before, someone who is stricken with the horrible disease that is ALS, who spoke through a computer, who required constant care and assistance, but obviously had a brilliant mind. And it was more than that.
He was more interesting than the wheelchair. He was clever. He was funny.
He was witty. He could hold down a series of conversations on a variety of topics. He was a great dinner party guest.
He was a great host. You put him on stage and he starts saying cool stuff. Interesting person.
Great title for a book. The thing became a bestseller. Huge.
He was already becoming popular in the public’s imagination because throughout the 1970s and 80s, the concept of a black hole started to move from just pure nerd physics circles to the wider public imagination. The general public started to recognize and learn what a black hole was. And Stephen Hawking was one of those people who was teaching people what black holes were because, dang it, he was the world’s number one expert on black holes.
I’ll give him that. Nobody knew more about black holes than Stephen Hawking. I will defend that statement.
He was already very well known. And then he writes this book. And Brief History of Time is a great book.
It has this huge intimidation factor. There’s this saying that it was a book that you needed on your bookshelf. You didn’t actually need to read it.
People would get to like page two and then quit. I was actually so intimidated by it as a teenager that I put off reading it until well after undergrad.
Like I was in like my third year of undergraduate physics education when I finally picked up Brief History of Time. I had it on my bookshelf for years and then I wondered what the big deal was. Turns out it’s not, that’s not bragging even though it sounds like bragging.
That’s the level of the book. It’s roughly an undergraduate level discussion of gravity, relativity, and quantum mechanics. But I get it for the general public who has not gone through three or four years of physics education.
That’s a pretty high bar. But now I’d say it’s easier to talk about black holes. It’s easier to talk about cosmology.
It’s easier to talk about quantum mechanics and quantum gravity. I have an easier time explaining all this stuff because Hawking laid the groundwork in the 70s, 80s, and 90s so that it became a part of the general consciousness. I can walk out, I can, you know, walk to a random person on the street and say, black hole, and assuming they don’t call the cops or something.
But if I just say to them, black hole, they’ll say, I know what you’re talking about. It’s those things like where light can’t escape in space. Most people know what a black hole is because of the work of Stephen Hawking because of his public outreach.
So we have someone who made major lasting contributions to physics, triggered important changes, important changes in how we understand and look at black holes, important changes in how we understand and look at the early universe, important changes in how we understand and look at the quantum nature of gravity. He broadened our knowledge of all this, of black holes, of the Big Bang, the nature of time, quantum physics, and he brought that to the public’s attention.
Yeah, he’s not Newton or Einstein, but all his work adds up to a pretty big delta. Thank you to Annika R. for the question that led to today’s episode.
And thank you to all my Patreon contributors. That’s patreon.com slash PM Sutter. I think I forgot to put in a Patreon plug in this episode.
Oh my gosh, I skipped right over it. I was so excited talking about something about the information paradox. There you go, patreon.com slash PM Sutter. You get a break this this episode from the surprise Patreon ad. That’s patreon.com slash PM Sutter. I’d like to thank my top contributors this month, Justin G, Chris L, Alberto M, Duncan M, Cory D, Michael P, Nyla, Sam R, John S, Joshua, Scott M, Rob H, Scott M, Louis M, John W, Alexis Gilbert M, Rob W, Jessica M, Jules R, Jim L, David S, Scott R, Heather, my guest Pete H, Steve S, Wadwadward, Lisa R, Koozie, Kevin B, Michael B, Eileen G, Toho Warrior, Steven W, and Brian O.
Thank you so much for all of your contributions. Keep those questions coming. That’s askaspaceman at gmail.com or just go to the website askaspaceman.com.
You’ll find a little box where you can put in questions there and it comes right to me and it goes right back out to you when I get around to answering them. Thank you so much for all of your support, for your questions, for your reviews on your favorite podcasting platform, and I will see you next time for more Complete Knowledge of Time and Space.
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