Hawking Radiation
esiegel | May 8, 2013"No valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now." -Alan Watts
"They do not see what lies ahead, when Sun has faded and Moon is dead." -J.R.R. Tolkien
One of the most amazing facts about the Universe is that, despite only having spent a few hundred years studying the fundamental constituents and forces of what makes us up, humanity has been able to accurately figure out just what all this actually is.
Image credit: ESO / S. Brunier.
The laws of nature are almost completely understood in a few, very important senses. We know that our Universe is about…
esiegel | February 6, 2013"According to the special theory of relativity nothing can travel faster than light, so that if light cannot escape, nothing else can either. The result would be a black hole: a region of space-time from which it is not possible to escape to infinity." -Stephen Hawking
You may have encountered objects that are the same size as one another, but have very different masses.
Image credit: Basic Science Supplies / © Accelerate Media.
This is because they're made out of different elements. The higher you go in the periodic table, the larger and more massive your individual atoms are, and so…
esiegel | May 16, 2008This has been all over my inbox since the press release came out yesterday; it's been on slashdot (thanks Brian), it's been at space.com, and there's a mediocre writeup on Universe Today. What's the big news? Black Holes don't destroy information after all!
What is this whole information thing, anyway? Take a look at all the normal stuff in the Universe: photons, protons, neutrons, and electrons, for example. They have lots of different properties each. They move around one another, they get bound and unbound from one another, they exert forces on one another, etc. They're aware of one…