Claire Lavoie | Dr. Samir Mathur

Stephen Hawking

Movie to watch: The Theory of Everything.

Most of his work was when he was fairly young.  What we’re most impressed with how well he continued to function with his disabilities.

Black Holes: what happens when the stuff in a star runs out? It becomes a white dwarf – no heat left.  The polyexclusion principle holds it up.  Then becomes a neutron star – super heavy but very small.  It keeps shrinking and shrinking and eventually becomes a singularity.  In physics, we couldn’t figure this out.  This smells like a paradigm shift… something that disagrees with our current understanding is making us rethink our approach.

“Anything where something goes wrong and we don’t understand it, we call it a singularity”

What is Hawking most famous for?

  1. Hawking radiation 1974
  2. Black hole information paradox 1975 – there is so much information in a star.  Every star is different.  So when a star collapses, that point still contains all the information the star had.  As it collapses, if you add stuff to it, you can get the energy to be zero, and therefore the mass is zero and all information is lost.

Since 1975 we’ve been trying to find a solution to this problem.

As you come closer to the black hole, you can use the energy to create particles (this is Hawking radiation).  Eventually the black hole evaporates, but all the information is still gone.

Thought from me -> if our universe started as a point, what if before the point existed, there was a different universe that was shrinking?  I think a current theory is that at some point the universe will get too large and collapse in on itself, so what if 1) time is not linear and 2) the universe cycles between being a point and very large, but because of the information loss paradox, it is a different universe every time.

If string theory is true, then none of the black hole stuff we just talked about can be true.

I saw a post on Twitter earlier that said the ocean is scarier than space because there is so much of the ocean we haven’t explored and there are weird creatures.  I don’t think this person truly understands how much we don’t know about space.

We can only explain 5% of everything.

Note to self: look into multiverses. String theory in 9-space dimensions.

If every singularity is surrounded by a horizon where nothing will ever come out, we (and physics) are safe.

One thought on “Claire Lavoie | Dr. Samir Mathur

  1. Your method of posts is growing on me, particularly the bits of humor you inject, Claire.. Ok, well, maybe the Twitter post wasn’t meant to be humorous, but it struck me as such. I would agree that being lost in the depths of the ocean or in the depths of space would be equally terrifying. Getting eaten by a giant squid, might actually be a relief in the former case. What makes space so daunting is the idea of floating away from the only planet you know. George Clooney did in Gravity and it looked a lot lonelier than dying in the ocean to me.

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