How To Use a Black Hole To See Your Past
5/4/202652 min
What if the universe is recording everything you’ve ever seen and done? In this episode, Hannah Fry and Michael Stevens explore the idea that light itself might carry a record of the past. And if it did, how could we watch history unfold by capturing it. Could a perfectly placed mirror or even a black hole bend that ancient light back to us? Could we watch the pyramids being built, or hear Einstein’s final words? From a nano-second old reflection in a mirror to the photons drifting through billions of miles of space, they reveal how everything we see is already gone, and uncover surprising truths about time, perception, and our own DNA.
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Clips
Showing 10 of 12Transcript preview
First 90 secondsHannah Fry· Host0:01
Welcome to The Rest is Science. I'm Hannah Fry.
Michael Stevens· Host0:02
And I'm Michael Stevens. Today, Hannah, we are going to look into the past by looking up, but not in the usual way. We're not gonna be g- doing the whole, like, whoa, when you see the stars, you're seeing them as they were years ago. No, no, no. We're gonna be looking at our own pasts in outer space.
Hannah Fry· Host0:21
Am I... Hang on, Michael. Am I also gonna learn a mnemonic during this for how many feet are in a mile? 'Cause I can feel one coming. That's not me looking into our past. That's me looking into our future.
Michael Stevens· Host0:31
Believe it or not, Hannah, yes, you will. You've looked into our future. This is an episode where the research I did took me all over the place, and I'm not going to organize it. I'm gonna just blast it all over everyone's ears and eyes. Here we go.
Hannah Fry· Host0:44
[Instrumental music] This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK.
Michael Stevens· Host0:52
Here's something strange. Your DNA contains more ancient viral fragments than genes. The genes that build our cells make up only 2% of our DNA, and for years, that is what scientists focused on. They treated the rest, the ancient viruses and stuff, as junk.
Hannah Fry· Host1:12
But now we know that that hidden majority, sometimes called the dark genome, influences how our biology works and how diseases like cancer behave.
Michael Stevens· Host1:23
It's a reminder that progress rarely comes as a single breakthrough. It builds gradually. Cancer Research UK