Last Tuesday, the Nobel Prize in Physics was jointly awarded to Roger Penrose, Andrea Ghez, and Reinhard Genzel. Penrose was awarded half of the prize for his foundational theoretical work proving the existence of black holes. The other half of the prize was shared between Ghez and Genzel for their experimental measurements that found the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, Sagittarius A*. This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics is the first to be awarded for research involving black holes. As we’ve seen in the past few weeks, black holes have massive implications throughout theoretical physics.…
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Help me obi Juan whoever you are, you’re my only Ho Unless you’ve been living under a rock, your first introduction to the concept of holograms was probably Leia’s message to Obi-Wan in Star Wars IV: A New Hope (unless your first introduction to holograms was Tupac, in which case. . . I feel old). Although to be clear, Tupac’s Coachella performance in 2012 was not actually a hologram—it was a 2D video projected on a seemingly invisible screen. We don’t actually have the technological capability yet to create real holograms—that is a 3D image projected from a 2D light…
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The last couple of weeks, I’ve been discussing the potentially destructive implications of Hawking radiation, the mechanism by which black holes slowly decay. One of the most pressing implications is the information paradox. A core tenet of quantum physics, the conservation of quantum information, demands that quantum information is not ever destroyed or created. But Hawking radiation seems to defy this rule. Information that enters a black hole becomes irretrievable, but it’s not destroyed. But, when a black hole evaporates into random thermal radiation, what happens to that information? One of the most popular theories involves all the information inside…
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From my last two blog posts on Hawking radiation and the conservation of quantum information, it’s clear that we have a major problem on our hands—the information paradox. We know that black holes decay over unimaginable timescales, seemingly erasing quantum information in the process. But we also know that quantum information has to be conserved. Theoretically, at least, we have to be able to trace particles back through their quantum histories. If black holes were entirely stable, then we could consider this condition met. While the information in a black hole would be inaccessible, it wouldn’t be destroyed. But if…
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In last week’s post on entropy, I blithely referred to black holes as spontaneously increasing in entropy. This may seem counterintuitive (as much as anybody can have “intuition” about black holes). If we view the increase in entropy as a system moving from order to disorder, how would a singularity become more disordered? How could the contents of a black hole spread out in a more disordered manner if they are supposed to take up an infinitely small amount of space? If we use the other definition of entropy, the dispersal of energy, then that would imply that a black…
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Over four nights in April 2017, eight different radio-wave telescopes across the globe fixed their gazes on a single infinitesimally small point—the black hole at the center of the Messier 87 galaxy (M87*). Around 55 million light-years from Earth, M87* and the hot plasma surrounding it create only a minuscule smudge on the night sky. To resolve an image from that distance would require a 13,000-kilometer telescope—roughly the diameter of Earth. Alternatively, the researchers of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Project stitched together an Earth-sized telescope using a set of radio-wave telescopes distributed around the globe. These telescopes were synchronized…
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Check out this audio journey into the center of a supermassive black hole posted to Science You Can Bring Home To Mom’s new YouTube Channel! Transcript and sources below. Transcript: [Intro Music] A Journey to the Center of a Black Hole by Sav Miller I don’t know about you, but personally, I want to be thrown into a supermassive black hole when I die. I haven’t gotten around to putting it in my will—I still have to work out all the legal details—but consider this a formal declaration of how I would like to be laid to rest. In fact,…
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