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Why Stephen Hawking’s Black Hole Puzzle Keeps Puzzling
...that black holes are not truly black. Quantum uncertainty causes them to radiate a small amount of heat, dubbed “Hawking radiation.” They lose mass in the process and ultimately evaporate...
How Einstein Lost His Bearings, and With Them, General Relativity
...proven especially acute for mathematicians who study the so-called black hole stability conjecture, which I wrote about in my recent article “To Test Einstein’s Equations, Poke a Black Hole.” Depending...
To Test Einstein’s Equations, Poke a Black Hole
...rotating black holes are stable. But their work did not cover black holes rotating above a certain threshold. Their proof also makes some assumptions about the nature of space-time. The...
Physicists Find a Way to See the ‘Grin’ of Quantum Gravity
...nature of gravity and space-time must be revealed — always hide behind the horizons of black holes. “Even a few years ago it was a generic consensus that, most likely,...
Physicists Mourn Joe Polchinski, Developer of Deep Ideas and Paradoxes
...share of lasting developments without following trends or getting into ruts. In important recent work, Polchinski reinvigorated an old paradox about black holes. Quantum fluctuations near the horizons of black...
What Makes the Hardest Equations in Physics So Difficult?
...as water flowing through a hose, so much harder to understand mathematically than, say, Einstein’s field equations, which involve stupefying objects like black holes? The answer, I discovered, is turbulence....
Earliest Black Hole Gives Rare Glimpse of Ancient Universe
...fog and figurative mystery. They want to know what burned the fog away: stars, supermassive black holes, or both in tandem? And how did those behemoth black holes grow so...
Plunge Into a (Virtual Reality) Black Hole
...with curves in the space-time fabric, space-time ceases to curve smoothly inside black holes, or even to make sense. Knowing what happens inside black holes would reveal the unknown, quantum...
‘Crazy’ Supernova Looks Like a New Kind of Star Death
...pair-instability, at which point, finally, they gravitationally collapse into black holes. (If Woosley’s theory is correct, there ought to be an absence of black holes over a certain mass range,...