Black holes

Brian Cox, Professor of Particle Physics at the University of Manchester describes the beauty of black holes. He begins with the implications of escape velocity, the speed we need to achieve in order to escape gravities grasp on us. Here on earth we need to achieve a speed of 8 miles/second. The sun is 400 miles/second. Imagine if we went bigger, such that the escape velocity of this bigger object exceeds the speed of light?

Black Holes.

A black hole is surrounded by the event horizon. The event horizon, from our perspective is where time stops. but what about the center of the black hole?

The singularity.

The center is not really a location, per se, but instead a distortion of space and time where roles begin to swap.

Steven Hawking, considered quantum mechanics at the center of the horizon. He zooms into the horizon and pictures entangled particles coming in and out of existence between the horizon and the singularity. The theory states that the particle that escapes the event horizon and leaps into our universe is energy that the black hole is losing. This energy is known as Hawking radiation.

But what happens to all the stuff that fell in?

Einstein theory says that it went into the singularity... which again is not a point in space or time. All this is left would be Hawking radiation particles. If we collect all of the Hawking radiation, which contains the information of what fell into the singularity. Can we collect all of this information and know exactly what fell in? Information is conserved. Every law of nature says this.

If we could then collect this, could we reconstruct it?

But when we put general relativity, quantum mechanics, and black holes together we predict that black holes erase information from the universe.

This is known as the Black Hole Information Paradox.

Current research generally states that black holes don't erase this information. We could then theoretically gather this information and put it in a quantum computer and reconstruct the information.

The finally thought Brian cox has is that perhaps space and time emerged from quantum entanglement. Some smaller part or piece we have yet to discover. This idea that space and time originate from something we have yet to discover is The Quantum Theory of Gravity.

If we want to therefore ask, when and where the universe began we must understand what space and time is first. Black holes are our first step toward this analysis. Hints of something deeply hidden.