Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Can you destroy a black hole?

Episode Date: December 31, 2019

Is it possible to destroy a black hole? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, terrorism. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System

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In session 418 of the Therapy for Black Girls podcast, Dr. Angela Nielbornet and I discuss flight anxiety. What is not a norm is to a lot. allow it to prevent you from doing the things that you want to do, the things that you were meant to do. Listen to therapy for black girls on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, Jorge, do you think the universe is a friendly place? Yeah, you know, the earth is pretty cozy here.

Weather's nice. Not too many erupting volcano. us everywhere. Yeah, but sometimes I feel like everywhere else in the universe is a bit crazy. You know, we got stars exploding, we got galaxies crashing into each other. Black holes seem to be gobbling everything up. Oh, man, I am so glad I pick this neighborhood to live in. No black holes in your neighborhood? That was your real estate requirement? Yeah, I talked it over with my agent. But no, yeah, you're right. Especially black holes, I feel like they are this incredible destruction source in the universe. You know, they're just these machines,

and eat everything up. Is there anything we can do about it? I'm not sure. Maybe we could nuke them. Hi, I'm Jorge. I'm a cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I don't live anywhere near a black hole.

I have one in my backyard. I hope it's a cute little baby back hole. Yeah, I feed it light and mass and energy. Does it have preferences or does it care what you feed it? Yeah, it does like the high protein, organic, light and matter. I don't think black holes are discriminatory. I think they will eat anything you feed them. Well, welcome to our podcast.

Daniel and Jorge explain the universe, not pet black holes. Daniel and Jorge explain how to take care of your black hole. There you go. A guide for the everyday black hole owner. Black holes for dummies by Daniel and Jorge. Oh, man, is that taken? I'm writing that book right now as we podcast. Clackety, clackety, cluckety, clackety. That's the sound of me writing it. Well, welcome to our podcast, which is a production of IHeard Radio.

In which we talk about all the fun, crazy, amazing, bonkers things in the universe. How long they will last, what we can do about them, can we understand them, and try to explain them all to you. That's right, all the amazing and beautiful. beautiful things that produce light and illuminate this incredible universe that we live in, and also the really destructive and powerful things to shred things and gobble them up forever, possibly. I feel like one big lesson of astronomy is that things on Earth are calm and friendly and cozy, like sitting on the beach in Florida, but that out there in the universe is like a lot of cosmic violence. Obviously, you've never been to Cleveland, Ohio.

Florida man, right? There's that whole meme. No, but I feel like, you know, the sun is a huge exploding nuclear bomb and galaxies are crashing into each other and black holes are gobbling stuff. I feel like it's less friendly out there. You know, we're lucky to live here on the nice cozy earth. Yeah, yeah. It could be a lot worse, is what you're saying.

Just lower your expectations and you're in paradise. Welcome to paradise. Well, it's both awe-inspiring because you have these incredible forces on cosmic scales smashing into each other and also a little terrifying, you know. It's sort of like sitting ringside at a heavyweight match, you know, or I guess it's more like sitting ringside at like a wrestling match. You never know if some 300-pound dude is going to get tossed over the ropes and right on to you. And right on to you.

Yeah, some black hole's going to spill it over and land in our lap. Yeah. I read this wonderful science fiction novel recently. It's called Parahelian Summer by Greg Egan, one of my favorite authors. And the premise of the book, it's not a spoiler, is that a small black hole enters our solar system and basically just screws it. everything up. It's really fascinating. Do we have enough pet food for it? We feed it you, basically. You're the first sacrifice. You're like, maybe if he eats this guy, it'll go away.

It'll be like, yuck. It came here to liberate the black hole that you were keeping, you know, you're keeping in your backyard unjustly. Oh, it called it. Oh, man, that's the sequel. Perihalian Winter. No, it's a great book. And, you know, it just brings to mind that out there in the universe, are really powerful forces, things that if they entered our neighborhood could do some serious damage. Yeah. And so one of those,

maybe the most powerful, you know, destructive force in the universe is a black hole. You know, black holes are kind of scary, right? They are kind of scary, and it's amazing that they're both super destructive, right? Super powerful.

Nothing can avoid their pull. And on the other hand, they're the product of the weakest force in the universe. You know, gravity we've talked about on the show of the fundamental forces is the weakest by like a factor of 10 to the 30th. So it's amazing that the most destructive thing in the universe comes from the weakest force. Wow, that would be the subtitle.

Be like black holes, colon. Gravity's revenge. Revenge of the gravitons. Gravity's back and it's pissed off. It's coming back for your pet. It's amazing to me that gravity in the end wins. And it's because it's just patient, you know. Everybody else is done with the party and gravity is still there.

And so I think it makes people wonder, like, are we at the whim of these incredible forces in the universe? Are we powerless to do anything about it? Could we, if a black hole came into our silver system, could we do something about it? Yeah, this is a question that a listener wrote in. And I hope it wasn't a listener that was, like, worried about their existence. You know, it wasn't worried like, uh-oh, scientists, can you cook up some super fancy black hole killing gun? But Roy Stone wrote into us and asked us this question. Hello, Daniel Jorge. I'm Roy from Florence, South Carolina. I really enjoyed your podcast and hope you have many more in the future.

My question is this. Is there anything that can destroy a black hole or how much energy would it take before it is completely removed from our universe? Thanks. I look forward from hearing your answer. Yeah, I love this question because it sort of like pays homage to the powerful forces out there in the universe, but also has some hope. Like, hey, humans, scientists, can you come up with something to protect us from the bully of the, of the cosmic neighborhood? Yeah. My question is, why does he want to know? I mean, is he...

Maybe he's got a black hole in his backyard, and he's worried. It's getting out of hand. And he needs some tips here. Maybe this wasn't such a great idea. Or maybe he knows something we don't know. I don't know. Roy, to prove this in. Or, wait, maybe he's got a black hole.

He's going to use it to destroy the Earth. And he first, he wants to figure out if Earth has any defenses. He's scoping out. Geez. None of these answers make me feel comfortable. Roy Stone, cosmic villain, or, you know, just pure intellect wondering about this question from an academic point of view. Let's go with that. That's right.

All right. Curiosity is his intent. Curiosity is his intent, exactly. And it's a wonderful question, a super fun question. So to the end of the podcast, we'll be tackling the question. Can we destroy a black hole? Dan, done, done. Great question, right?

Like, we think, I guess it's, well, it's a weird question, because how can you destroy a hole? Like, how do you, how do you, like, if you have a hole, how do you destroy it? Do you just fill it up? You fill it with something? Yeah. Technically the hole still there is just full. That's interesting.

Yeah, like sometimes I have a hole in my schedule and I fill it with a meeting. Does the hole still exist? Is there a philosopher of time that can answer that question for us? Yeah, there you go. But I think he means, like, have it not be this, like, you have this black hole that's sucking things in and destroying them. Can you, like, do something about it? Make it go away. Yeah.

But, you know, your point goes to my criticism of the name black hole, which I never really thought was a good name because it implies that it's an absence of things, right? When, in fact, the black hole is a super dense blob. It should be called, like, a black mass or a black rock or something because there's a lot of stuff in there. It's not empty at all. You wanted the name the Whiteson Blab. The Whiteson Whatever. Not the Whiteson, I don't care what you call it. Oh my God, it's a Whites and Whatever coming towards us.

Winning the Nobel Prize for discovering the Whites in Whatever. I wonder, Daniel, if you do discover something worthy of a Nobel Prize, or I guess when you discover something worthy of Nobel Prize. Thank you for that. Could you name it whatever you want? Could you name it the Whiteson, whatever? And people would have to use this name? That is a great question.

First of all, I want to make a pledge that if I, I ever do discover something Nobel-worthy, I will call you. All right, thanks. You will get to chime in. In that case, it's a cham, whatever. No, I think that basically whoever names it gets to call it that. But there are some experiences in history where they've been overruled. You know, like the first discovery of particle, yeah.

The guy who discovered particles, he called it corpuscules. Nobody calls it corpuscules now because it's a terrible name. And so maybe just sticks around for a few years. and then eventually, if it wasn't good enough, it just sort of falls out of favor. Imagine the society got to chime in on your kids' names. They're like, oh, I don't like that one. We'll go with whatever whites them.

Well, you know, eventually your kids get to chime in and they can change their names. Oh, that's true. Particles don't get to do that. But there's another famous story in history about two different groups discovering the same particle, the same moment, giving it different names. Oh, and how did they decide?

Or do they call it both? We didn't. You hyphenated. We hyphenated. Exactly. We'll tell that story on another podcast. That story has so many fun wrinkles. We'll tell it on another podcast. All right. We'll say it for later, dash, another time. Precisely. But I was curious how many people out there have plans to destroy a black hole, have ideas for how to destroy black hole, or worried about destroying black holes. So I walked around and I asked people what they knew about whether black holes could be destroyed.

Yeah, so think about it for a second. Before you listen to these answers, if you were approached and you were as, Do you think it's possible to destroy a black hole? What would you answer? Here's what people had to say. I can't, but thanks to hawking radiation, black holes would just do the job themselves. I'm so much manually destroy it. As far as I know, we can just wait as long as we can

for all of it to be emitted as hawking radiation. Sort of watch it fall apart. Exactly. We can watch it fall apart, but I don't know if on command, we can accelerate that process, I guess. I don't know. So if I had to destroy it, blow it up. Yes.

Yeah? How might you destroy a black hole? I think Stephen Hawkins has something about it, but I don't know. No. No? Why not? I don't know, because I think because box holes, they're so dense and matter. I feel like we just don't know that much about it yet.

But, I mean, I don't know for sure, but I think so. I don't know. I think it'd be cool. Oh, yeah. I don't know a lot of black holes, but from what I do know, they're like endless, so just, I don't, it just seems cool. I can't explain why, but it just seems very cool. Is it okay if I record your answers? Yeah, yeah, it's just kind of like, count towards my thesis, though.

Depends on your answers. That's right. First question is, do you think it's possible to destroy a black hole? I think maybe. How would you go about if you had to? Is a black hole coming towards Earth, and you can save the planet? you destroy the black hole? I mean, in a way, like, the black hole is like a gravitational field, right?

So if you have something that can counter that singularity, then maybe you can destroy a black hole. Black holes are like, I know they're like inescapable, so then you can't really do anything to a black hole. All right. A lot of great answers. Yeah, a lot of great answers. And here I went and asked some experts. I asked some particle physics graduate students what they thought. I like the one who said, does this count towards my?

thesis. That was my grad students. Are you judging me right now? Is this a new chapter you want me to add? Don't you know I'm already stressed out? I know they have enough to do. Grad students can't really say no to their advisor. But my favorite part about these answers is that everybody had something to say. You know, everybody's like, ooh, fascinating. Everybody wanted that power. They wanted to know how you could destroy a black hole. Yeah, I think the overall reaction I got is that people were a little surprised by this question. They're like, oh, what? Like the idea of destroying

a black hole had never even occurred to them or heard of it. But as soon as they heard the idea, they wanted to know how. It's a kind of a vampire. Oh, I never thought, oh, but it would be useful to know, wouldn't it? Here, I got ten ideas. Yeah, I should have asked people for money. Hey, we're collecting $100 towards the black hole gun.

Can you pay you donate? The fund is a black hole. any money you give to particle physics the whole field is a black hole you might have said yeah but you know I was surprised too by this question you know I opened my email now and I saw that what you wanted to talk and I was like oh wow that's a great question I never even

thought about like wanting to destroy a black hole but it does seem kind of like a useful thing there you go folks this is an episode of the podcast even Jorge would listen to well let's not get to ahead of ourselves here. I am listening to it right now. Technically, I listen to it,

all of it, even the parts we cut out. Even cartoonists want to know how to defend the earth from black holes. I mean, I mean, hear all the behind the scenes, all the deleted takes. That's right. That's right. All right. So let's get into this question, and it's super interesting.

How do you destroy a black hole? And so we'll get into, we'll recap what a black hole is and can they can think about whether they can last forever, and we could ever read this story won. But first, let's take a quick break. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage,

kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and order, criminal justice system is back.

In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. that's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Well, wait a minute, Sam, maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out.

with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now, he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor, and they're the same age. And it's even more likely that they're cheating.

He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the psychology podcast. Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about exploring human potential. I was going to schools to try to teach kids these skills, and I get eye rolling from teachers or I get students who would be like, it's easier to punch someone in the face.

When you think about emotion regulation, like you're not going to choose an adaptive strategy, which you're is more effortful to use unless you think there's a good outcome as a result of it if it's going to be beneficial to you because it's easy to say like go you go blank yourself right it's easy it's easy to just drink the extra beer it's easy to ignore to suppress seeing a colleague who's bothering you and just like walk the other way avoidance is easier ignoring is easier denial is easier drinking is easier yelling screaming is easy complex problem solving meditating you know takes effort Listen to the psychology podcast on the IHartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, Daniel, what is the formula for destroying a black hole?

Do they have an auto-destrook button? Yeah, you just announce self-destruct in one minute, you know? No, you send one tiny X-wing in. to the flaw at the center of the black hole and you can blow it up that way and then use the force that's right

stay on target yeah the key to destroying something as a physicist is to understand how it's made understand its life cycle what holds it together what it wants in life and then try to use that against it somehow

I guess that's sort of the formula for destroying anything yeah isn't that one of the rules of war like know thy enemy or is it know thyself I'm not sure that's philosophy or war or both Know thy cosmic singularity that might destroy everything, just in case. That was Socrates.

You just plagiarized that from Socrates. Yeah, so let's maybe do a quick recap of what a black hole is. So you're saying it's not a hole or black. It's not a hole, no. Black hole is essentially runaway gravity. Remember, gravity is a force and it pulls everything together. Anything that has mass or energy gets attracted to other things that have mass or energy. and that's what gravity is

and that's what holds us onto the earth and that's what keeps the earth going around the sun and that's what squeezes the sun so that fusion starts it's the weakest force in the universe but you get enough stuff together and it can be quite powerful. Right, it's kind of like love, right?

It's the underdog in this crazy universe but at the end it holds everything together. I thought the lesson there is that love is the most powerful force in the universe you can overcome everything. Well, just like gravity. There you go. So can love destroy a black hole?

Is that the answer? Oh, I think that was the answer in Interstellar. I think you're right. Wasn't it? Oh, well, I think we can just end this podcast and just half people go. Yeah, remember interstellar, not a documentary, people, okay? Fiction. I just remember that.

That was the answer in that movie, wasn't it? Yes, that's the answer. In every Hollywood movie, love is the most powerful force. Love is, yeah, yeah, even in Avengers. I think in arrival, also, love wins out in the end. It's basically all about love. Right. Basically, love is what screenwriters go to when they don't know how to get out of the physics in a plot. That's right, because physics has not yet discovered a fundamental force that aligns with love.

We've got gravity, we got electromagnetism, we got the weak force, the strong force. Love, we don't really understand it yet. What would you call the quantum particle for love? The coupon, I guess. The cube. Oh, I see what you did there. I see what I'm not there. But anyway, so that's what a black hole is.

It's gravity, just like the gravity that keeps this planet together and us on it. But if you take that gravity to an extreme and, like, crammed a lot of stuff held together by gravity in a small amount of space. That's right, because gravity never gives up. It just keeps pulling and pulling and pulling. And if you have enough stuff, you have a big enough blob. Eventually, gravity gets so crazy that it pulls it into a dense, enough object that there's so much gravity that it basically bends space. Because remember, gravity is not just this force that pulls stuff together. Gravity bends the shape of space,

which is why it changes the direction that things move. So a black hole is when space is bent so much that it basically pops off from the universe and becomes self-contained. Nothing can go out of it. All the paths inside there lead closer to the center of the black hole. There's no way out of it anymore. Right. But it doesn't close off itself off completely because you can still get into it, right? You can still go into a black hole. Can you? Yeah, it's like a trap. Yeah. Maybe it should be called a black trap instead of a black hole. A black trap. Yeah, but this is funny discontinuity because it's like a one-way wall in space now. And it's not like if you ran really fast or if you push really, really hard, you could get out. There is no path out no matter how

fast you go. Like photons inside a black hole, they're still moving at the speed of light. They're just moving towards the center. There's no direction they can go in to get out. Right. What if I have a really strong rope and I lower you in like it's the strongest rope in the universe and I lower you and can I still pull you out? No you can't and actually people have done all these sort of crazy thought experiments like

super strong ropes lowering people in what would it look like once you cross the event horizon essentially that rope is broken oh because not even like the attraction between the molecules of the of the rope can keep it together

Yeah, a lot of these thought experiments try to cheat. Like you have these rules, nothing can come outside of the event horizon. But then you add like, oh, a super strong rope that can't be broken that basically breaks that rule that nothing can come out of the event horizon. Because a super strong rope implies that you could pull on the molecules that are inside the event horizon from the ones that are on the outside of the event horizon and you can't. Right. What if I use Wonder Woman's lawsuit? Again, fictional universe, you can do anything. In our actual universe, none of that works.

But the cool thing about black holes is that they just keep going. They gobble stuff and they gobble stuff. And the size of the black hole depends on the amount of stuff inside it. So as it eats stuff, it gets bigger. And then as it gets bigger, it can eat more stuff and you see where this goes. Yeah, let's talk about like the life cycle of a black hole, right? Like when a black hole's form, it's really small, it's a little blob, but then as it eats more things, it just grows. That's right.

It doesn't peak, I guess. It just, it's one-directional. It just keeps going bigger and bigger and bigger. Kind of like your career, right? It never peaks. It just keeps going. Yeah, precisely. And black holes form when stars that are really big, when they collapse,

when they're done burning their fuel and they can't resist gravitational pressure. They form sometimes at the centers of galaxies, and those where the biggest ones are. And black holes just eat the stuff around them and just get bigger and bigger. They can even eat other black holes. And we've seen that happen. Wow. And they can get really big. Like, there are some black holes that are, like, millions of times bigger than the mass of, like, our sun, for example.

That's right. The ones at the centers of galaxies are enormous. They're millions of solar masses. And nobody knows how they got that big. Like, if you just take a bunch of stars and form a galaxy, then you get a black hole of the center and the black hole grows and grows, but it doesn't grow that much. So we're still trying to understand, like, how black holes at the centers of galaxies got so darn big. Our models don't explain it. But, you know, we have these ideas of like, well, galaxies combine.

You know, sometimes galaxies bang into each other, and then the black holes at the center eat each other and become one mega black hole. And so there's some fun ideas there about how you can make super big black holes by having them eat other super big black holes. Wow. I mean, basically there's no limit to their size, right? Like, as far as we know, it's not like a star that grows and gets brighter, but at some point it starts to run out of fuel.

and dams and becomes us something else. Black hole, as far as we know, just keeps on going forever. That's right. If you keep feeding a black hole, it will keep growing. It's like that book. I don't know if you know,

I've ever read that book to your kids where they get a little pet fish and the guy at the fish store says, don't feed it too much. And the kid goes to know, why not? And he feeds it too much and it gets bigger and bigger and bigger and it never stops growing.

You know, black holes are like that. If you keep feeding them, they will keep growing. There's no theoretical limit. Nothing says you can't have a black hole the size of the galaxy or the size of the cluster of galaxies. Really? No reason why not.

At some point it doesn't like collapse space, you know? I'm just thinking. Into what? Into a bigger blacker hole? I don't know. Like it just detaches from our universe and goes off into another universe or something. I don't know. Like it doesn't it at some point just collapse or it becomes a theoretical impossibility?

No, there's no limit there. Black holes can grow and grow and grow. If you keep feeding them, it will keep growing. I guess the question is why isn't the whole universe then just a black hole right now? Like why hasn't at all just come together into a big giant black hole? Yeah, that's a great question. There's two answers to that. One is things might turn into a black hole eventually and we're just not there yet.

Stay tuned. Stay tuned. The reason that we're not in a black hole yet is basically rotation. Like the same reason that the earth goes around the sun instead of plummeting into it, our star is going around the black hole of the center. It's not plummeting into it because we're orbiting. And that rotation keeps us from falling in. I see.

We're in the flush part of the giant toilet flush universe. That's right. I like to think that it's the cosmic suburbs, you know, instead of the gritty urban center. Toilet flushing suburbs. We're flushing the toilets in the suburbs. And the other reason is that galaxies are super far apart. Like why doesn't our galaxy just get got? hobbled up by black holes and other galaxies,

galaxies are crazy far apart and dark energy is pushing them further and further apart. Oh, you're right. So the deep future of the universe might be that all these galaxies eventually collapse into their own individual super mammoth black hole, but then those black holes won't merge if dark energy is keeping them apart. Huh. Yeah, that's interesting. I guess I hadn't thought about it before because, you know, our sun is kind of like a black hole.

It is like a giant source of gravity. And if you think about it, we don't get sucked right into it. We are like in an equilibrium with our sun and the rest of the solar system. Yeah, we did a whole podcast episode about like what would happen if you replaced the sun with a black hole of the same mass. And the answer is it would get darker, but we would keep orbiting because you would still just have the gravity of the black hole pulling on the earth. And it pulls on the earth the same way any other object that that mass does. Black holes don't have a special power to suck you in. They just have gravity.

And you can resist gravity by rotating. Running really fast, basically, in the sideways. direction. Yeah. So the earth is, you know, getting pulled on by the sun, but it keeps missing, right? And it misses again, it misses again. It's like constantly falling towards the sun and missing. Right, right. It's like a lasso, like the Wonder Woman lasso. All right. Let's have a mini podcast episode inside this one about Wonder Woman. Get it out of your system. Let's move on. All right. Well, so I guess the question is, does that mean that black holes last forever? You know, can they just keep going? And technically, they'll out

last everything else in the universe? Will the universe eventually just be black holes? That's a great question. And, you know, as I said before, if you keep feeding a black hole, it will keep growing and growing and growing. But another question is what happens if a black hole stops being fed? So you have like a black hole in the middle of space and nobody feeds it anymore. You know, you go on vacation and you don't feed that black hole in your backyard. Will it last forever or will it eventually fall apart? I see. If you starve the black hole, does it, eventually wither die. Yeah, and it turns out that black holes not actually black.

They give off the tiniest little glow, and that glow means they're giving away energy. So if you don't feed it, eventually that glow will leak out all the energy of the black hole and it will evaporate. Yeah, this is a Stephen, it's called Hawking Radiation, right? He came up with this idea that black holes are actually leaking, like they're not airtight. He was the first one to think about black holes from a thermodynamic point of view because from a point of view of thermodynamics, everything in the universe has a temperature and everything that has a temperature glows and it gives off radiation depending on that temperature.

It's called black body radiation. We can do a whole other podcast about it. So his question was like, what is the temperature of a black hole? If it's not zero, it must be radiating. And if it's radiating, where is that coming from? And that was a year of his life figuring that out. Wow. Can you imagine the moment he thought of that question? Like, I wonder what the temperature of a black hole is.

It's actually pretty well documented. He was on a trip, I think, in Moscow, and a couple Soviet scientists asked him that question. They're like, hey, what do you think is the temperature of a black hole? We think it might not be zero. And they had this moment, and he's like, oh, my gosh. And they went off and scribbled his notebooks for a year and figured it out. Well, this is something I never quite understood about hawking radiation. So the idea is that at the very border of a black hole, like the border of the event,

that horizon or like the, you know, the point where nothing can escape it. The idea is that the universe creates a particle there out of nothingness and it splits off, right? That's the idea. Like one half goes out, one half goes in, and somehow we call that evaporation. Can you explain that a little bit for me? Yeah, so this is a tricky concept. And formally, it comes from requiring that black holes have a temperature and then trying to figure out what that temperature is and finding a way to make that consistent for different observers moving at different speeds. It's very complicated.

And then there's the sort of pseudoscience hand-wavy explanation that you often hear about hawking radiation. And that's that you have part. That's the one you just said. And it doesn't quite perfectly make sense, but it's a fine way to think about it sort of as an introduction to the topic. And the idea is you have a little blob of space

just outside the event horizon, Not inside, right? Anything that's inside the event horizon will never leave. You have this blob of space just outside. And then you have this gravitational force from the black hole. It's incredible gravitational power. And the blob of space borrows a little bit of that energy. And it gives it a fluctuation and turns it into a particle. Okay. So you're getting like a boost of energy from this gravitational field. That boost turns you into a particle. And that particle splits into, you know, two other particles, matter and antimatter. One of them falls into the black hole. and by conservation momentum, the other one has to go the other direction so it goes away from the black hole. Right. And so it escapes. And so what you have is basically

a blob of energy that originally was inside the black hole because it came from the gravitational field of the black hole and that energy is now leaving with this particle that's gone. Right. And so the mass of the black hole

essentially comes from its energy. And so if it has to give up some energy to boost away this other new particle, then it's lost some of its mass. Oh, I see. It loses the energy when it creates this particle. Yeah, its energy gets used to create this particle, and then it loses one of it and doesn't come back. And remember that the mass of an object equals MC squared that tells you that the mass of an object comes from its stored internal energy. And so if it gives up some of its energy, then it loses some mass.

And so it's not like something that was inside the event horizon actually escaped, but you stole some of the energy from the black hole. Oh, I see. It's about the one that got away, not the... not about the one that went into the black hole. It's like the one that got away. Are you going to make this a love story again? No, it's a heartbreaking story here because they broke up and they never got back together. That's sort of a way to think about how a black hole could lose some of its energy, which is another way to think about, you know, warm objects radiating.

Like black body radiation shouldn't be something weird in particle physics. It's just like if you have something hot on your stove top, it glows, right? It gives off energy. So anything that has a temperature is glowing is diffusing energy out. So the idea is, well, black holes have a lot of energy. So why don't they lose some of that also into the outside universe? And this is like a little picture of how microscopically that might happen. Right.

And so the idea is that the black hole is at the very surface kind of emitting light or photons. And that energy that's going away from the black hole, which means that eventually it's like a candle. It will eventually maybe burn out. Yeah. And it's not just light. it can give off any kind of particle. Hawking radiation can produce positrons and electrons or muons and anti-muons. And that's actually one of the cool things about black holes that we might be making at CERN

is that if you make a tiny little black hole at CERN, it'll evaporate super quickly and it'll evaporate into every kind of particle that's out there through hawking radiation. So the signature of a black hole in a collider is this like crazy spray of a huge variety of particles. Nothing else makes that, which is why black holes and colliders are so fascinating to look for. All right. Well, I guess the main lesson is that black holes don't live forever. That's right. But it's a very, very slow process. You have some enormous black hole. This is a, it's pretty black. So it's leaking a tiny, tiny bit of energy. All right, let's get into how slow are black holes dying on their own, how slow they're getting snuffed out.

And also, if we needed to accelerate the process, could we actually do something to destroy a black hole? But first, let's take a quick break. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic scene.

In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and order, criminal justice system is back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit.

Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't. trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now hold up, isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor and they're the same age. And it's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet.

So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeartRadio. out Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the psychology podcast. Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about exploring human potential. I was going to schools to try to teach kids these skills and I get eye rolling from teachers or I get students who would be like, it's easier to punch someone in the face. When you think about emotion regulation, like you're not going to choose an adapted strategy which is more effortful to use unless you think there's a good outcome.

a result of it if it's going to be beneficial to you because it's easy to say like like go you go blank yourself right it's easy it's easy to just drink the extra beer it's easy to ignore to suppress seeing a colleague who's bothering you and just like walk the other way avoidance is easier ignoring is easier denial is easier drinking is easier yelling screaming is easy complex problem solving meditating you know takes effort listen to the psychology podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, Daniel, so black holes evaporate slowly, meaning they give up a little bit of light and energy just sitting there if you don't feed them, which means that eventually a black hole

sort of shrink down into nothingness, basically, right? That's right. But if you have a black hole pet and you're going on a long vacation, you do need to arrange somebody to feed it. Otherwise, it will not be a runaway process on this great earth is what you're saying. Yeah, so depending on your motivations there, evil, villain, or savior, make your decisions. But it takes a very long time. If you had a black hole like the mass of the sun, and we've never seen a black hole as small

as the sun, the smallest black hole we've ever seen is many times the size of the sun. But even the black hole with the mass of the sun would take 10 to the 67 years to evaporate. Oh, what? 10 to the, is there even a name for a number that big? 10? Because like the age of the universe is not that long or the size of the universe is not that big. No, the universe, remember, age is in billions. Like 10 to the 8?

So it's like 10 to the 10, right? Because a billion is 10 to the 9 and the universe is 13.8 billion years old. So we're like, you know, 10 to the 10 years into the universe. This is 10 to the 57 times as long. Oh, geez. So basically they live forever because they're, I mean, that sounds crazy to me. Think about being still alive then or, you know, the universe, what the universe might look like at that point. Yeah, but remember, we have no idea what the time scale for the universe is like.

You know, 100,000 years into the universe, lasting billions of years might have. seemed crazy. And so, you know, only of 10 billion years into the universe, maybe this is still basically the first flash and the universe will last for 10 to the 100 years. We just don't know. Can you imagine some aliens that 10th, at year 10 to the 100? Hey, remember back then when there were all these black holes everywhere? What?

Yeah, I used to listen to this great podcast back then. What happened to those guys? They evaporated. Like everything else. It's called Hawking Cancellation of your podcast. But the more. More mass of the black hole, the longer it takes. So if you have a smaller black hole evaporates more quickly,

which is why, for example, black holes, we make it CERN, if we do make them, which are super tiny, like the mass of a proton, would evaporate super quickly. Even like a black hole that's like 200 tons of stuff, would only take about one second to evaporate. Oh, wow, that's amazing. So if you take 230 tons and make a black hole, that would be massive, but it would only last one second.

Yeah, it would evaporate away in just a second. So the thing that black holes need to do to survive is to eat, right? The bigger they get, the longer they will last because the slower they will evaporate. All right. So black holes don't last forever, but they last a very long time, practically forever. And so the question now is, Daniel, if a black hole came towards us and threatened the existence of our solar system and our way of life, could we destroy a black hole, Daniel? What can we do to accelerate the destruction of a black hole? It's pretty tough.

I got three ideas. I'm not sure any of them are going to work, though. Wait, these are your ideas or like the scientific community? Are you saying I don't speak for the scientific community? I don't know. I mean, what are you saying? Is this the Royal Wii or is this the Daniel in his basement ideas? I have gathered together all of the ideas that are out there and I speak for the scientists.

You know, I'm wearing a white lab coat. I'm on the news. Here are the best ideas from all the signs. Good. Okay, I just want to make sure it here. First idea is a bad idea. It's sort of the Bruce Willis of ideas. And that's, let's nuke it, right?

We've got these powerful weapons. Every time something comes to endanger the earth, in movies at least, they just shoot up a nuke and try to blow it up. Right, like break it up, like disrupt it. Yeah, because the idea is the black hole comes from its density. So if you could somehow, like, crack it in half, then maybe you could weaken its power. Right. Well, I guess technically, right? Like if you take a black hole and split it in the middle and separate it the two halves, it would sort of dissipate the black hole, right? Because the density would go down.

Eventually. And also it depends exactly on the structure of the matter inside the black hole. If it's, if general relativity is correct and black holes have a singularity inside them, then, you know, splitting them in half just makes two smaller black holes. Oh, I see. You can't actually get rid of the black holiness. But if there's some distribution of stuff and you can break it in half, then you can lower the density enough. If quantum mechanics is right, then it has to be distributed a bit. You could lower the density enough, and maybe you could stop it from being a black hole.

All right. So then is it possible to break one up and blow it up? No. It's totally not possible. And it would backfire dramatically in Act 3 of this screenplay because you're basically just throwing fuel on the fire. I mean, a black hole is not just a, collection of mass, it's energy, right? The mass of the black hole comes from its energy. So

if you just pour more energy into it like a nuclear bomb has a lot of energy, it just makes it stronger. Oh, man. It's like that supervillain that takes all your punches and transforms it into energy to shoot you back with. It's exactly like that. It's like, you know, you've got a pile of glue and you're pouring more glue onto it, right? It doesn't help. So like even if I throw a giant bomb and it explodes inside of the event horizon, it wouldn't help break things apart. No, it would just make it more dense. And remember, nothing can leave the event horizon. So even if it blows up inside the event horizon, it's still just going to be an exploding nuclear weapon inside the event horizon, making the mass of the black hole larger, right?

It won't blow it up. Nothing can leave. And so it makes it more intense, even if you threw a star into a black hole, right, which is basically a huge bomb. Oh, wow. Okay, hold on. Yeah, somebody tell Bruce Willis to we're canceling the plan where all right yeah you're saying his agent's not

going to be happy with that it's basically nothing no matter or energy can break it up because it's already a condensed collection

of matter and energy I even thought you know what if you threw like another black hole into it but this time it's an anti-matter

black hole what? It was like an anti a black hole made out of entire where you

fed as a little kid with antimatter. That's right. Yeah, because antimatter and matter are both matter. And so in principle, you could make a black hole out of pure antimatter. But again, it's just more energy. So you throw an antimatter black hole into a matter black hole. And you're just going to pour more energy into it. It's going to make a stronger black hole.

It doesn't matter what kind of matter you put into it. Oh, man. This is giving me nightmares here. Let's make me real uncomfortable for some reason. like some villain you can't stop so that's a bad idea to try to blow it up to give it more energy what are some of the other ideas

all right so there's some other ideas that involve trying to make the black holes spin and black holes are dense blobs of stuff right but some of them we think are spinning not necessarily they don't all have to spin but some of them can spin you mean inside whatever's happening inside it has some sort of rotation of momentum to it.

Precisely, because angular momentum can't go away. And so if something falls into a black hole and it was originally spinning around it, it's still spinning around the center of mass when it goes inside the event horizon. So the overall rotation of the black hole reflects the overall rotation of the stuff originally. That's why the solar system is still spinning because angular momentum from the initial gas cloud is still here. So if our solar system eventually becomes a black hole, it will be spinning. Wow. But we don't know what's going on inside the event horizon, though.

Do we know for sure that they can still keep, you know, spinning energy? We don't know for sure, but we're pretty sure that angular momentum is conserved in our universe. So it's a pretty fair assumption. And the fascinating thing is that the size of the black hole depends not just on the mass of the stuff inside of it, but also on this rate of spin. And the faster the black hole spinning, the smaller the event horizon. Oh, really? Yeah. So the idea is maybe you could, like, shrink.

the event horizon by making the black hole overspin. You could like drop stuff into it that has a really high spin rate. Like going really fast, almost tangent to the event horizon, right? Like if you're pushing someone on the merry-go-round, you want to make them go faster, right? You give them a little push on the edge. I see. You could over-spin it, maybe. So if we take all those spinning toys that kids were playing with a couple of years ago, you know,

the ones that would move the ball bearings? Fidget spinners, save the world. If you take all those fidget spinners that were a huge fat and you toss him out into the Bruce Willis. Give them to Bruce Willis to deliver. Bruce, get back on the ship. We have a new idea. Bruce, come back.

We got the fidget spinners. You're saying, but that's basically yes, right? I mean, you're saying if you throw a bunch of stuff in there that has a lot of spin and it might shrink the black hole. Yeah. And this is crazy. This is a theoretical idea. Nobody knows who it would actually. work. But if you did that, you might be thinking, but the mass is still there, right?

Wouldn't you still have a singularity, even if it's spinning? The answer is yes. Potentially, you could take a black hole and turn it into what we call a naked singularity, which is a singularity without basically an event horizon around it. Nobody knows what that would look like, what it would be like, and if it would be any better or worse than having a black hole nearby. Well, having a naked anything, you know, makes things more interesting. Yeah. Yeah. That's why, you know, that's what got paramount interested in our screenplay.

I feel like that's a spoof version of the Bruce Willis movie. The naked-gun singularity. Yeah, there you go. Nobody knows if it would work. Nobody knows if it would be better or worse, you know, than just suffering through the destruction in the original black hole. But in theory, it might be possible to overspin the black hole and turn it into a naked singularity. Okay, but we don't know that might be better or worse. We don't know.

Yeah, exactly. But technically, right, if you hire me to destroy your black hole and then I turn into a naked singularity, I'm going to be invoicing you. All right. And I'm sure we'll gladly pay that if we're still alive from your naked singularity. And then the last idea actually came from a listener. Really? So you have one listener asking a question and you had another listener answer the question. Yeah, another listener spontaneously wrote in with an idea for how to destroy black holes

and wanted to know if it would work. And I thought, oh, perfect. I'm trying to figure out how we could destroy black holes. Oh, wow, that's amazing. That's a little suspicious. I feel like these two guys or two people are playing you here, Daniel. Oh, maybe they're just different. One is an alter ego of the other one.

One is the anti-black hole version of them. No, James Castile from Indiana, he wrote in asking about dark energy. Because remember, dark energy is expanding space. And so it's essentially diluting everything. So he wanted to know, is dark energy happening inside black holes? And if so, could it, like, expand the space inside a black hole enough to basically shrink the density so you no longer have a black hole? Oh, clever. Like, eat the black hole from the inside out.

Yeah. Because remember, a black hole ate a star from an inside out. So it's like sort of turn its own strategy back on itself. Yeah, like blow it up from the inside. through space itself. Yeah, exactly. So great idea, James, and when we do want to build a black hole gun,

you are definitely invited to be on the task force. He can pull the trigger. You can press the big red button. But is there something to this idea? Could you make a dark energy gun or ray or bomb to expand the space inside of a black hole? Well, there are a lot of problems with this idea. Number one is we don't understand.

what dark energy is like at all. We think it's some property of space that when you have various configurations of matter in the universe, it causes space to expand. But it's actually very, very, very weak. It's not very powerful at all. It only adds up to a big effect because space is so huge. The dark energy, for example,

plays no role in the structure of our solar system because the gravity of our solar system is powerful enough to overcome dark energy. And so when it comes to a black hole, dark energy is basically negligible, right? It has no effect at all. Yeah, but it is everywhere like love, isn't it? It's everywhere like love, but we don't actually know if there is dark energy inside a black hole.

Because we don't know what dark energy is. If it's a property of space itself, then yeah, there's some effect from dark energy inside a black hole, but we don't know if it means the expansion of space. Oh, I see. And anyways, it would be much weaker than the gravity that's giving the black hole together. Dark energy is just one factor, and to answer whether space is, expanding, you have to fold in dark energy, you have to fold in the matter and a radiation density of the universe, then you crank it through general relativity equations to discover

whether or not you're getting expansion. The reason there's expansion out there in space is because dark energy is the only thing out there. But if you have matter and energy, like in a black hole, then you're not going to get expansion. Right. But I guess the question is, the idea is that, you know, maybe one day we'll understand what dark energy is. Maybe one day we might be able to harness it or concentrate it. You know, like if there is something out there in space in the universe that can expand space, maybe that's one way to kill a black hole. It's like if we understand that, maybe we can make something that will expand the space

inside of a black hole. I lost count of how many maybe you see you used there. But yeah, this is Hollywood, man. It doesn't, you can pile those on. We can build a dark energy gun and give it to Bruce Willis. Then, yeah, this plan is rock solid. But the point you make is reasonable, right, is that there is something that can balance gravity.

We described earlier black holes are a runaway process because gravity just takes over and eventually wins because it's always attractive. But you're right, we do know that there is something about gravity that can be repulsive, and that's dark energy. And so, you're right, eventually if we understand it, we might be able to manipulate it and cause black holes to fall apart from the inside

using dark energy, but there's a lot of maybes between now and then. Right. All right. So it sounds like our best idea, is our fidget spinners and magical unicorns is our base idea here.

Yeah, magical uniforms is definitely a good idea. How about a fidget spinner on a magical unicorn? Being ridden by Bruce Willis. Using love to save the universe. Welcome to our pitch. Thank you for coming to our pitch.

We'll take those millions of dollars now. Thank you very much. That's right. We want a big advance. We're not delivering this script until the end of the universe. All right. Well, I guess I mean that to answer the question, can we destroy a black hole? It sort of sounds like maybe not.

I mean, it sounds like we have some wild ideas. But so far, they seem like a pretty inevitable part of the universe that will basically be around here forever and maybe never go away. Yeah. If I had to bet on the most likely fate of the universe, it would be a bunch of galaxies that collapsed into black holes separated by vast distances. So it's a pretty dark and bleak version of the future. Well, we hope that stimulated some thinking out there in you guys about what black holes are and whether they'll be around for a very long time or whether we could destroy one if we

had the need to. And whether or not it was a good idea to start a little black hole pet in your backyard. That's right. And just in case, save those fidget spinners. They might come in handy later. And anybody out there with a magical unicorn, please get in touch. Yeah, so this is a great question. And so if you guys have a question out there, please send it to us.

What's the email address, Daniel? Questions at danielanhorpe.com. That's right. And you can also write to Daniel on Twitter. And I'm doing the Instagram for this podcast, which explains why some of the answers in the comments are coming from a cartoonist. Basically a physicist. You're a deputized physicist by now. Yeah, so you can find us both at Daniel and Jorge.

It's at Daniel and Jorge. Thanks for sending in questions, and thanks for your attention. See you next time. If you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line we'd love to hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge, that's one word, or email us at Facebook. Feedback at Daniel and Jorge.com.

Thanks for listening and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Five, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged.

Terrorism. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Why are TSA rules so confusing? You got a hood of you. I'm take it all. I'm Manny. I'm Noah. This is Devin. And we're best friends and journalists with a new podcast called No Such Thing, where we get to the bottom of questions like that.

Why are you screaming? I can't expect what to do. Now, if the rule was the same, go off on me. I deserve it. You know, lock him up. Listen to No Such Thing on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. No.

Such. Thank you. I'm Dr. Joy Hardin-Bradford, host of the Therapy for Black Girls podcast. I know how overwhelming it can feel if flying makes you anxious. In session 418 of the Therapy for Black Girls podcast, Dr. Angela Neil Barnett and I discuss flight anxiety. What is not a norm is to allow it to prevent you from doing the things that you want to do, the things that you were meant to do. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you, get your podcast. This is an IHeart podcast.