New from Tim — Interview with Scott Kelly and "How to Survive a Black Hole: Instructions and Other Brilliance from Astrophysicist Janna Levin"

Hi All,

Please find your weekly roundup email below. The "5-Bullet Friday" newsletter is coming on Friday, as always.

Here’s what I’ve published in the past seven days or so...

🎧 New podcast episode:
Scott Kelly — Lessons Learned from 500+ Days in Space, Life-Changing Books, and The Art of Making Hard Choices (Brought to you by Rokform rugged cases for iPhone and Galaxy, Athletic Greens all-in-one supplement, and 99designs global creative platform).

✍️ New blog post:
"How to Survive a Black Hole: Instructions and Other Brilliance from Astrophysicist Janna Levin"

Short descriptions for each are below.

Enjoy!

🎧 New podcast episode:
Scott Kelly — Lessons Learned from 500+ Days in Space, Life-Changing Books, and The Art of Making Hard Choices

Scott Kelly (@StationCDRKelly) is a former military fighter pilot and test pilot, an engineer, a retired astronaut, and a retired US Navy captain. A veteran of four space flights, Scott commanded the International Space Station (ISS) on three expeditions and was a member of the yearlong mission aboard the ISS, the single longest space mission by an American astronaut. In October 2015, he set the American record for the total accumulated number of days spent in space.

Go for Launch: How to Dream, Lead, and Achieve is Scott’s two-hour audio course available exclusively on Knowable. In this candid and entertaining audio course, Scott shares instructive stories from his childhood in New Jersey, his days as a US Navy test pilot, and his year hurtling around the globe at 17,500 mph and teaches hard-earned lessons on perseverance, personal motivation, and the human side of success, drawn from his experiences in the most competitive, extreme environments imaginable. You can find it now at knowable.fyi/scott.

Please enjoy!

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Stitcher, Castbox, Google Podcasts, or on your favorite podcast platform.

This episode is brought to you by Rokform! Rokform is the active lifestyle iPhone and Galaxy protective case company. Their protection is beyond great, with thousands of 5-star reviews and customer testimonials—or “Survival Stories” as Rokform calls them—that include a drop from the upper deck of a baseball stadium and a 75-foot cellphone tower fall.

Rokform’s rugged cases have been called the Swiss Army Knives of phone cases due to a versatile design that allows you to use your iPhone or Galaxy phone in ways you never thought possible. Each case is built around an integrated magnet that is completely safe for your phone. The magnet allows you to instantly attach your device to any magnetic surface—toolboxes, file cabinets, refrigerators, golf carts, you name it. The Tim Ferriss Show listeners — that’s you! — get 25% off at Rokform.com when you use promo code TIM.

This episode is also brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time, “If you could only use one supplement, what would it be?” My answer is usually Athletic Greens, my all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The 4-Hour Body in 2010 and did not get paid to do so. I do my best with nutrient-dense meals, of course, but AG further covers my bases with vitamins, minerals, and whole-food-sourced micronutrients that support gut health and the immune system.

Right now, Athletic Greens is offering you their Vitamin D Liquid Formula free with your first subscription purchase—a vital nutrient for a strong immune system and strong bones. Visit AthleticGreens.com/Tim to claim this special offer today and receive the free Vitamin D Liquid Formula with your first subscription purchase! That’s up to a one-year supply of Vitamin D as added value when you try their delicious and comprehensive all-in-one daily greens product.

This episode is also brought to you by 99designs, the global creative platform that makes it easy for designers and clients to work together to create designs they love. Its creative process has become the go-to solution for businesses, agencies, and individuals, and I have used it for years to help with display advertising and illustrations and to rapid-prototype the cover for The Tao of Seneca. Whether your business needs a logo, website design, business card, or anything you can imagine, check out 99designs.

You can work with multiple designers at once to get a bunch of different ideas or hire the perfect designer for your project based on their style and industry specialization. It’s simple to review concepts and leave feedback so you’ll end up with a design that you’re happy with. Click this link and get $20 off plus a $99 upgrade.

✍️ New blog post:
"How to Survive a Black Hole: Instructions and Other Brilliance from Astrophysicist Janna Levin"

This guest post is authored by Janna Levin (@jannalevin), the Tow Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Barnard College of Columbia University. Janna has contributed to an understanding of black holes, the cosmology of extra dimensions, and gravitational waves in the shape of spacetime. Janna is also director of sciences at Pioneer Works, a cultural center dedicated to experimentation, education, and production across disciplines, as well as Pioneer Works’ virtual home, The Broadcast.

Janna’s books include How the Universe Got Its Spots, the novel A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines, which won the PEN/Bingham Prize, and Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space, the inside story on the discovery of the century: the sound of spacetime ringing from the collision of two black holes over a billion years ago. In 2012, she was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a grant awarded to those “who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship.”

What follows is the third chapter from her new book, Black Hole Survival Guide. Accompanying artwork is by Lia Halloran.

Enjoy!

Enter Janna . . .

You should appreciate the hazards of encountering a black hole unawares. A black hole is invisible in the absence of any tracers, just darkness against darkness. You may well not realize the threat before your fate is secured. You must carry a powerful light source to reveal in backlight the clandestine black hole, an unilluminated disk, an absence in a bright world.

Light lives in space too and has to follow some path. If you shine a flashlight from your couch, you don’t notice the light beam falling toward the Earth. The lines appear straight. But they’re not perfectly straight. The comparative inflexibility of light’s route through space is attributable to its intrinsic speed. Light only travels at one speed, the speed of light. The free-fall curves for light—launched as light must be, at the cosmic speed limit—are straighter than the curves of slower objects. So the bend that the Earth’s gravity imparts to the path of light is more subtle, straighter, and more difficult to detect.

The bending of light offered the first test of general relativity. On the twenty-ninth of May, 1919, the Moon eclipsed the Sun to allow a thin ray of light from the Hyades star cluster to fall into Arthur Eddington’s telescopes. With the blinding solar rays occulted, the faint image of Hyades could be collected. But at the time of the eclipse, Hyades was positioned directly behind the Sun from the Earth’s perspective. If light traveled along straight lines, none of the luminosity from Hyades should have made it to the Earth. The cluster would spray its rays in all directions, and those headed toward the Earth would fall into the Sun. If light traveled along the curved paths predicted by relativity, then the Sun would act like a lens and bend an image of Hyades our way.

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