Weird Science Wednesday: Black Hole News Round Up

It’s Wednesday afternoon, you are so sick of work, and the weekend is two days away. Why don’t you totally do your head in by watching this PBS Space Time video about black holes. Black holes are a constant trope in science fiction (or, if we’re being accurate, science fantasy because apparently everything Hollywood has taught us is wrong). Host Gabe Perez-Giz breaks down the basic physics of black holes, and even though he sticks to classical general relativity (so no Hawking radiation, string theory, or quantum mechanics), he will blow your mind. Black holes don’t suck things in! Whaaaat?! Also, this is a thing he says:

"A black hole is a bunch of events, so is that collection of events somehow mimicking mass? Or does it actually have mass? Is there even a difference?"

I don’t know! I have to say, now that I’ve watched this video, I no longer have any idea what the hell happened in Interstellar.

As a bonus black hole treat, Stephen Hawking, black hole wizard extraordinaire, posted a new theory on the space giants this week. At the Hawking Radiation conference yesterday he gave a presentation and explained that they store information in a two-dimensional hologram. So if you managed to approach the black hole, you would turn into a two-dimensional holographic smudge on the edge of the event horizon for all of space-time. Or you might go through a portal into another universe. He’s not really sure which one yet. On Monday night, the physicist said,

“The existence of alternative histories with black holes suggests this might be possible. The hole would need to be large and if it was rotating it might have a passage to another universe. But you couldn't come back to our universe.

"So although I'm keen on space flight, I'm not going to try that."

You can watch his entire presentation here. You probably can't understand it, though.

Sources: PBS Space Time, KTH via Gizmodo. Black hole image courtesy of NASA.