Evaporating Black Holes
In Evaporating Black Holes, narrator Kate Yule explores Stephen Hawking’s discovery that black holes can evaporate. Learn how Jeff Steinhauer creates an artificial black hole in an attempt to prove the existence of Hawking Radiation. If Hawking Radiation exists, then all black holes could eventually disappear, which means scientists would not be able to reconstruct past events, or predict future ones. This video is excerpted from BBC’s Einstein & Hawking: Masters of Our Universe, a mind-bending documentary that tells the story of how the two most famous scientists of the 20th Century transformed our understanding of the Universe and changed the world.
Lesson Express
Q: How does Jeff Steinhauer make artificial black holes?
A: Jeff uses subsonic and supersonic sound waves to create an event horizon that sound cannot escape, just like light cannot escape a black hole.
Q: What is the principle of determinism?
A: Determinism is the idea that when we destroy something, it is broken down but not lost, and that all energy is conserved. We can reconstruct the entire future or past of any system as long as we have all of the information.
Q: If black holes do evaporate, what does that mean for our understanding of physics?
A: If black holes can evaporate and we lose the information inside, then we can’t reconstruct the past or predict the future. This is called the information paradox.