Podbit · Dwarkesh Podcast
Two eclipse expeditions failed before 1919 — Argentina got clouded out, and a German team was arrested when WWI broke out. That was lucky: Einstein's pre-GR prediction was wrong, predicting only the Newtonian bending. He corrected it to double the Newtonian value during the quiet of the war, just in time for Eddington's successful 1919 expedition.
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The distant observer sees something strange: as the infaller approaches the event horizon, gravitational time dilation makes them appear to move slower and slower, their light redshifts from visible to infrared to radio, and eventually they just fade — the last photon arrives, and then silence. The observer never crosses, as seen from outside. But from the infaller's own perspective, their clock ticks normally, the horizon is unremarkable, and for a galactic-mass black hole the tidal forces at the horizon are too weak to feel [1] — Adam Brown "From outside, you never see someone cross the event horizon — they slow, redshift, and fade. From inside, the infaller notices nothing unus…" 1:13:03 . Brown emphasises that the event horizon is 'teleological' — it is not a locally measurable feature but a fact about your future. For a large enough black hole you could have descendants born inside the event horizon, live out a normal life, and only die at the singularity.
General relativity predicts that gravity bends light passing the Sun at exactly double the amount predicted by Newtonian physics, confirmed by Eddington's 1919 eclipse expedition.
Sir Arthur Eddington's 1919 British eclipse expedition confirmed Einstein's corrected light-bending prediction, launching Einstein as a global celebrity and making GR the consensus view.
Factories that replaced coal engines with electric ones in the early 1900s got only 6% efficiency gains. Those that redesigned their entire factory around electricity got a 3x productivity improvement. Swapping AI tools into your existing structure will give you 6%. Rebuilding around AI will give you 10x.
Lebanese terrorists backed by Iran were holding American hostages throughout the Reagan presidency. Reagan had loudly campaigned against negotiating with terrorists — putting him in an impossible position that his team quietly decided to ignore.
During the Iran-Iraq War, the US openly supplied Iraq with weapons, training, and intelligence. At the same time, Oliver North was secretly funneling missiles to Iran. The US was playing both sides of a shooting war.
Oliver North traveled to Iran under the alias 'William P. Goode' with a fake passport. CIA Director William Casey allegedly gave him cyanide pills so he could kill himself rather than be tortured if captured. He returned safely and the deal moved forward.
The Pentagon sold missiles to the CIA for $3,700 each. The CIA sold them to Richard Secord at cost. Secord sold them to Iranian middleman Ghorbanifar for $10,000 each. Ghorbanifar charged Iran even more. The profit — including $3 million in interest in one Swiss account — was diverted directly to fund the Nicaraguan Contras.
America secretly transferred 2,000 missiles and missile parts to Iran in 8 shipments over more than a year. Only 3 of 7 hostages were released. Three more were taken. The net result was zero freed hostages and a full-blown constitutional scandal.
On October 5, 1986, a CIA Contra supply plane flew a weapons drop at 2,500 feet in broad daylight. A Sandinista soldier shot it down. The only survivor, Eugene Hasenfuss, had borrowed a parachute from his skydiving brother. He was captured, paraded in front of cameras, and told the Sandinistas everything he knew.
The CIA supply operation used a front company called Southern Air Transport, widely known to be a CIA cover. Crew members of the downed plane carried their Southern Air Transport employee IDs in their wallets. One also had a business card directly linking him to Oliver North's office in Washington.
When the scandal broke, Oliver North and his secretary Fawn Hall conducted what became known as a 'shredding party,' destroying a day's worth of documents. The full truth of Iran-Contra may never be known because of what was fed through that shredder.
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