Can you destroy a black hole?

Is it possible to destroy a black hole?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Hey or hey. Do you think the universe is a
friendly place? Yeah? You know, the Earth is pretty cozy here,
weather size, not too many erupting volcanoes everywhere. Yeah, but
sometimes I feel like everywhere else in the universe is
a bit crazy. You know. We got stars exploding, we
got galaxies crashing into each other. Black holes seem to
be gobbling everything up. Oh man, I am so glad

(00:30):
I picked this neighborhood to live in. No black holes
in the neighborhood, that was your Yeah, we do. I
talked it over with my agent, But no, Yeah, you're right.
Especially black holes. I feel like they are this incredible
destruction source in the universe. You know, They're just these
machines eat everything up. Is there anything we can do
about it? I'm not sure. Maybe we could nuke them.

(01:09):
Hi am for Hammache cartoonists and the creator of PhD comics. Hi.
I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I don't live
anywhere near a black hole. I have one in my backyard.
I hope it's a cute little baby. Yeah. I feed
it light and mass and energy. Does it have preferences
or does it care what you feed it? Yeah? It
does like the you know, the high protein, organic light

(01:32):
and matter. I don't think black holes are discriminated to her.
I think they will eat anything you feed them. Well,
Welcome to our podcast. Daniel and Jorge explain the universe
not pet black holes. Daniel and Jorge explain how to
take care of your black hole, and there you go,
a guide for the everyday black hole owner. Black Holes
for Dummies by Daniel and Jorge oh Man. Is that taken?

(01:56):
I'm writing that book right now as we podcast. Qui clackically, clickery, clackery.
That's a sound of me writing it. Well, Welcome to
our podcast, which is a production of I Heart Radio,
in which we talk about all the fun, crazy, amazing,
bonkers things in the universe, how long they will last,
what we can do about them, Can we understand them
and try to explain them all to you. That's right,
all the amazing and beautiful things that produce light and

(02:19):
illuminate this incredible universe that we live in, and also
the really destructive and powerful things to stread things and
gobble them up forever. Possibly. I feel like one big
lesson of astronomy is that things on Earth are calm
and friendly, and cozy, like sitting on the beach in Florida.
But that out there in the universe is like a
lot of cosmic violence. Obviously you've never been to Cleveland, Ohio, Florida. Man,

(02:45):
there's that whole there's that whole meme. No, but I
feel like, you know, the sun is a huge exploding
nuclear bomb, and galaxies are crashing into each other and
black holes are gobbling stuff. I feel like it's less
friendly out there. You know, we're lucky to live here
on the nice, cozy earth. Yeah, yeah, it could be
a lot wars, is what you're saying. Just lower your
expectations and you're in paradise. Welcome to paradise. Well, it's

(03:06):
both awe inspiring because you have these incredible forces on
cosmic scales smashing into each other, and also a little terrifying.
You know. It's sort of like sitting ringside at a
heavyweight match, you know, or I guess it's more like
sitting ringside like a wrestling match. You never know if
some three pound dude is gonna get tossed over the
ropes and right onto you, right onto you, Yeah, have

(03:27):
some black hole's gonna split over and and then in
our lap. Yeah. I read this wonderful science fiction novel recently.
It's called Paraheli in Summer by Greg Egan, one of
my favorite authors, and the premise of the book, it's
not a spoiler, is that a small black hole enters
our solar system and basically just screws everything up. It's
really fascinating. Do we have enough pet food for it?

(03:48):
We feed it? You basically you're the first. You're like,
maybe if he eats this guy, it'll go away. It'll
be like, yuh, it came here to liberate the black
hole that you are keeping, you know, in uh, you're
keeping in your backyard unjustly. So it called it, Oh man,
that's the sequel Winter. No, it's a great book, and

(04:12):
you know, it just brings to mind that out there
in the universe are really powerful forces, things that if
they entered our neighborhood could do some serious damage. Yeah,
and so one of those, maybe the most powerful, you know,
destructive force in the universe is a black hole. You know,
black holes are kind of scary, right, they are kind
of scary, and it's amazing that they're both super destructive, right,

(04:34):
super powerful. Nothing can avoid their pull and on the
other hand, they're the product of the weakest force in
the universe. You know, gravity we've talked about on the
show of the fundamental forces is the weakest by like
a factor of ten to So it's amazing that the
most destructive thing in the universe comes from the weakest force. Wow,
that would be that the subtitle be like black holes

(04:57):
colon Gravity's revenge, Revenge of gravitons. Gravity is back and
it's piste off. It's coming back for your pet. It's
amazing to me that gravity in the end winds and
it's because it's just patient. You know, everybody else has
done with the party and gravity is still there. Yeah,
And so I think it makes people wonder like, are
we at the whim of these incredible forces in the universe?

(05:20):
Are we powerless to do anything about it? Could we
if a black hole came into our solar system, could
we do something about it? Yeah? This is a question
that a listener wrote in And I hope it wasn't
a listener that was like worried about their existence, you know,
it wasn't worried like, oh, scientists, can you cook up
some super fancy black hole killing gun? But roy Stone

(05:40):
wrote into us and asked us this question. Hello, Daniel Horray,
I'm roy from Florence, South Carolina. I really enjoyed your
podcast and hope you have many more in the future.
My question is this, is there anything that can destroy
a black hole? Or how much energy would it take
to before it is completely removed from our universe? Thanks?
I look forward from hearing your answer. Yeah. I love

(06:00):
this question because it sort of like pays homage to
the powerful forces out there in the university, but also
has some hope, like, hey, humans, scientists, can you come
up with something to protect us from the bully of
the cosmic neighborhood? Yeah? My question is why does he
want to know? I mean, maybe he's got a black
hole in his black he is worried that's getting out

(06:21):
of hand and meet some tips here. Maybe this wasn't
such a great idea, or maybe he knows something we
don't know. I don't know for right to listen, or wait,
maybe he's got a black hole is going to use
it to destroy the earth, and he first he wants
to figure out if it has any defenses. Scoping out
the defenses. None of these answers make me feel comfortable

(06:43):
roy Stone, cosmic dulling, or or you know, just pure
intellect wondering about this question from an academic point of view,
let's go with that. That's right, all right, let's let's
curiosity is his intent? Curiosity is his intent exactly, And
it's a wonderful It's been a super fun question. So
to be on the podcast, we will be tackling the

(07:04):
question can we destroy a black hole? Done? Done? Done?
Great question? Right, Like we think, I guess it's well,
it's a weird question because how can you destroy a hole?
Like how do how do you how do you like

(07:24):
you have a hole? How do you destroy it? Do
you just feel it? Fill it with something? But yeah,
the whole technically, the whole still there, it's just full.
Mm hmm. That's interesting. Yeah, Like sometimes I have a
hole in my schedule and I fill it with a meeting.
Does the whole still exist? Is there a philosopher of
time that can answer that question for us? Yeah? There
you go. But I think he means like, how did
not not be this? Like you have this black hole

(07:46):
that's sucking things in and destroying them. Can you like
do something about it? Make it go away? Yeah? But
you know, your point goes to my my criticism of
the name black hole, which I never really thought was
a good name, because it implies that it's the absence
of things, right when in fact the black holes a
super dense blob, should be called like a black mass

(08:06):
or a black rock or something, because there's a lot
of stuff in there. It's not empty at all. You
wanted to name the whites and blob the whites and whatever.
That's the whites one, Oh my god, it's the Whites
and whatever. Coming towards it winning the Nobel Prize for
discovering the Whites and whatever. I wonder, Daniel, if you
do discover something worthy of a Nobel prize, or I

(08:28):
guess when you discover something that, could you name it
whatever you want? Could you name it the Whites and whatever?
And people would have to use this name? That is
a great question. First of all, I want to make
a pledge that if I ever do discover something nobel worthy,
I will call you and you will get you will
get to chime in the cam whatever. No. I think

(08:51):
that that basically whoever names it gets to call it that.
But there are some experiences in history where they've been overruled,
you know, like the first disc particle. Yeah, the guy
who discovered particles, he called it Corpus skules. Nobody calls
it Corpus scules now because it's a terrible name. And
so maybe just sticks around for a few years and
then eventually if it wasn't good enough, it just sort

(09:12):
of falls out of favor. Measured society got to chime
in on your your kids names. I don't like that one.
We'll go with whatever whites then, well, you know, eventually
your kids gets to chime in and they can change
their particles. Don't get to do that. But there's there's
another famous story in history about two different groups discovering
the same particle the same moment, giving it different names,

(09:35):
and how did they decide or do they We didn't
we call it we hyphen exactly. We'll tell that story
on another podcast. That story has so many fun wrinkles.
Will tell it on another podcast. We'll say it for
later dash another time, precisely. But I was curious how
many people out there have plans to destroy black hole,

(09:55):
have ideas for how to destroy black hole, or worried
about destroying black hole. So I walked around and I
asked people what they knew about whether black holes could
be destroyed. Yeah, so think about it for a second
before you listen to these answers. If you were approached
and you were asked, do you think it's possible to
destroy a black hole? What would you answer? Here's what

(10:16):
you've had to say. I can't, but thanks to Hawking radiation,
black holes would just do the job themselves, none so
much manually destroy it. As far as I know, we
can just wait as long as we can for all
of it to be admitted as Hawking radiation sort of
watch it fall apart exactly. We can watch a fall apart,
But I don't know if on command we can accelerate

(10:37):
that process. I guess I don't know. Um, if I
had to destroy it, bow it up? Yes? How how
much you destroy black hole? I think? Do you not
consisting about it? But I don't know. No, no, why
of um? I don't know, because I think because block

(10:58):
holes are so ends um in matter, I feel like
we just don't know that much about it yet. But
I mean, I don't know for sure of it. I
think it's now, I don't know. I think it'd be cool. Um,
I don't know. A lot of black holes, but from
what I do know, they're like endless, So just I
don't it just seems cool. I can't explain why, but

(11:19):
it just seems very cool. It's okay if I record
your answers. Yeah, it's just kind of like account counts
forward to my thesis. Stuff depends on your answers, that's right.
First question is do you think it's possible to destroy
a black hole? I think maybe how would you go bad?
If you had to? Is a black hole coming towards Earth,
you can save the planet, how would you destroy the

(11:40):
black hole? I mean in a way like the black
holes is like a gravitation whole field, right, So if
you have something that can counter that singularity, then maybe
you can destroy a black hole. Black Holes are, like
I know, they're like inescapable, So then you can't really
do anything to a black hole, all right. A lot
of great answers, a lot of great answers. And here

(12:01):
I went and asked some experts. I asked some particle
physics graduate students what they thought, and I like the
one who said, does this count towards my thesis? That
was my grad students judging me? Right now? Is this
a new chapter you want me to add, don't you
know I'm already stressed out. I know they have enough
to do. Grad students can't really say no to their advisor.

(12:23):
But my favorite part about these answers is that everybody
had something to say. You know, everybody's like, oh, fascinating.
Everybody wanted that power. They wanted to know how you
could destroy a black hole. Yeah. I think the overall
reaction I got is that people were surprised a little
surprised by this question, you know, and they're like, oh, what,
like the the idea of destroying a black hole and

(12:44):
never even occurred to them or heard of it. But
as soon as they heard the idea, they wanted to
know how. I think, how do you kill a vampire? Oh?
I never thought, Oh, but it would be useful to know,
wouldn't it. Here I got ten ideas. Yeah, I should
have asked people for money. You were collecting a hundred
dollars towards the black hole gun. The fund is a

(13:05):
black hole. Any money you give to particle physics, the
whole field is a black hole. Might escape. Yeah, but
you know, I was surprised to by this question, you know,
I opened my Amona, and I saw that what you
wanted to talk and I was like, oh wow, that's
a great question. I never even thought about, like wanting
to destroy a black hole, but it does seem kind

(13:26):
of like a useful thing. There you go, folks, this
is an episode of the podcast. Even Jorge would listen to. Well,
let's not get too ahead of ourselves here. I am
listening to it right now. Technically I listened to it,
all of it, even the parts we cut out. Even
cartoonists want to know how to defend the Earth from

(13:47):
black hole? I even, I mean here all the behind
the scenes, all the deleted delete it takes. That's right,
that's right. All right, So let's get into this question,
and it's super interesting. How do you destroy or a
black hole? And so we'll get into we'll recap what
a black hole is and can they think about whether
they can last forever? And we've read the story one.

(14:09):
But first let's take a quick break. All right, Daniel,
what is the formula for destroying a black hole? Do
they have an auto destruck button? Yeah, you just announced

(14:33):
self destruct in one minute, you know. Um, Now you
send one tiny X wing into the flaw the black
hole and that, and you can blow it up that
one and then use the force that's right to stay
on target. Yeah. The key to destroying something as a
physicist is to understand how it's made, understand it's life cycle,

(14:53):
what holds it together, what it wants in life, and
then try to use that against it somehow. I guess
that's sort of the formula for destroying anything. Yeah, it's
isn't that one of the rules of war? Of war?
Like know thy enemy? Where does it know thyself? I'm
not sure that's philosophy or war. Both know thy cosmic
singularity that might destroy everything. Just in case that was Socrates.

(15:13):
You just plagiarize that from Socrates. Yeah, so let's let's
make do a quick recap of what a black hole is. So, um,
you're saying it's not a hole or black it's not
a hole. No black holes essentially run away gravity. Remember,
gravity is a force and it pulls everything together. Anything
that has mass or energy gets attracted to other things

(15:35):
that have mass or energy. And that's what gravity is,
and that's what holds us onto the Earth, and that's
what keeps the Earth going around the Sun. And that's
what squeezes the sun, so that fusion starts. It's the
weakest force in the universe, but you get enough stuff
together and it can be quite powerful. Right. It's kind
of like love, right, It's it's the underdog in this

(15:58):
crazy universe, but at the end it's everything together. I
thought that the lesson there is that love is the
most powerful force in the universe. You can overcome everything,
just like gravity. There you go, So can love just
wear a black holes? That? I think that was the answer.
And Interstellar, wasn't it? Oh? Well, I think this podcast

(16:18):
and just ask people go remember Interstellar not a documentary people,
okay fiction That that was the answer, wasn't it. Yes,
that's the answer to In every Hollywood movie, love is
the most powerful force. Yeah, even in adventures. I think
in a rival also, love wins out in the end.

(16:39):
It's basically all about love. Basically, love is what screenwriter
is good too when they don't know how to get
out of the physics in a plot. That's right, because
physics has not yet discovered a fundamental force that aligns
with love. We got gravity, we've got electromagnetism, we've got
the weak force, the strong force love. We don't really
understand it. Yet, what would you call the quantum particle

(16:59):
for love? The cupon? I guess the cup. I see
what you did there. But anyway, so that's what a
black hole is. It's gravity, just like the gravity that
keeps this planet together on us on it. But if
you take that gravity to an extreme and like crammed
a lot of stuff held together by gravity in a

(17:20):
small amount of space. That's right because gravity never gives up.
It just keeps pulling and pulling and pulling, and if
you have enough stuff, you have your big enough blob.
Eventually gravity gets so crazy that it pulls it into
a dense enough object that there's so much gravity that
it basically bends space. Because remember, gravity is not just

(17:41):
this force that pulls stuff together. Gravity bends the shape
of space, which is why it changes the direction that
things move. So black hole is when spaces bend so
much that it basically pops off from the universe and
becomes self contained. Nothing can go out of it. All
the paths inside their lead closer to the center or
the black hole. There's no way out of it anymore. Right,

(18:02):
But it doesn't close up itself off completely because you
can still get into it right, You can still go
into a black hole, can you. Yeah, it's like a trap. Yeah,
maybe you should be called a black trap instead of
black hole black trap. Yeah, but this is funny discontinuity
because it's like a one way wall in space now,
and it's not like if you ran really fast or
if you pushed really really hard, you can get out.

(18:23):
There is no path out no matter how fast you go.
Like photons inside a black hole, they're still moving at
the speed of light. They're just moving towards the center.
There's no direction they can go in to get out. Right,
What if I have a really strong rope and I
lower you in, like it's the strongest rope in the universe,
and I lower you and can I still pull you out? No,
you can't. And actually people have done all these sort

(18:45):
of crazy thought experiments like super strong ropes lowering people in.
What would it look like, Um, once you cross the
event horizon, essentially that rope is broken broken. Oh because
not even like the attraction between the molecules of the
precisely of the rope can keep it together. Yeah, a

(19:05):
lot of these thought experiments try to cheat, like you
have these rules, nothing can come outside of the event horizon.
But then you add like, oh, a super strong rope
that can't be broken, that basically breaks that rule, and
nothing can come out of the event horizon because the
super strong rope implies that you could pull on the
molecules that are inside the event horizon from the ones
that are on the outside of the event horizon, and
you can't. Right, what if I use ononder woman's lawsuit again,

(19:31):
fictional university, you can do anything. In our actual universe,
none of that works. But the cool thing about black
holes is that they just keep going. They gobble stuff,
and they gobble stuff, and the size of the black
hole depends on the amount of stuff inside it. So
as it eats stuff, it gets bigger, and then as
it gets bigger, it can eat more stuff. And you
see where this goes. Yeah, let's talk about like the

(19:51):
life cycle over a black hole, right, Like, when a
black holes form, it's really small, it's a little blob.
But then as it eats more things, it just grows
and it doesn't peak. I guess it's just it's one directional.
It just keeps going bigger and bigger and bigger. It's
kind of like your career, right, never peaks, It just
keeps going, Yeah, precisely. And black holes form when stars

(20:14):
are that are really big, when they collapse, when they're
done burning their fuel and they can't resist gravitational pressure.
They form sometimes at the centers of galaxies, and those
were the biggest ones are. And black holes just eat
the stuff around them and just get bigger and bigger.
They can even eat other black holes. We've seen that happen. Wow,
And and they can get really big, like there are

(20:34):
some black holes that are like millions of times bigger
than the mass of like our sun for example. That's right.
The ones that the centers of galaxies are enormous. They're
millions of solar masses, and nobody knows how they got
that big. Like if you just take a bunch of
stars and form a galaxy, then you get a black
hole the center, and the black hole grows and grows,
but doesn't grow that much. So we're still trying to understand,

(20:57):
like how black holes are the centers of galaxies got
so darn big. Our models don't explain it. But you know,
we have these ideas of like, well galaxies combine, you know,
sometimes galaxies banging into each other, and then the black
holes at the center eat each other and become one
mega black hole. And so there's some fun ideas there
about how you can make super big black holes by
having them eat other super big black holes. Wow. I

(21:20):
mean basically, there's no limit to their size, right, Like,
as far as we know, it's not like a like
a star that grows and gets brighter, but at some
point it starts to run out of fuel and dams
and becomes something else. Black hole, as far as we know,
it just keeps on going forever. That's right. If you
keep feeding on a black hole, it will keep growing.

(21:40):
It's like that book. I don't know if you know
I've ever read that book to your kids where they
get a little pet fish and the guy the fish
store says, don't feed it too much, and I keep don't,
you know, why not? And he feeds it too much,
and it gets bigger and bigger and bigger, and it
never stops growing. You know. Um, black holes are like that.
If you keep feeding them, they will keep growing. There's
no theoretical limit. Nothing said, as you can't have a

(22:01):
black hole the size of the galaxy or the size
of the cluster of galaxies. The only reason why not
at some point it doesn't like collapse space, you know,
I'm just thinking into a bigger blacker hole. I don't know,
like it just detaches from our universe and goes off
into another universe or something. I don't know, Like it
doesn't it at some point just collapse or it becomes

(22:22):
a theoretical impossibility. No, there's no limit there. Black holes
can grow and grow and grow. If you keep feeding them,
it will keep growing. I guess the question is, why
isn't the whole universe then just a black hole right now?
Like why haven't hasn't at all just come together into
a big giant black hole. Yeah, that's a great question.
There's two answers to that. One is things might turn

(22:45):
into a black hole eventually and just um, the reason
that we're not in a black hole yet is basically rotation.
Like the same reason that the Earth goes around the
Sun instead of plummeting into it, our stars going around
down the black hole in the center. It's not plummeting
into it because we're orbiting, and that rotation keeps us
from falling in. I see, we're in the flush part

(23:07):
of the giant toilet. Flush universe. That's right. I like
to think that it's the cosmic suburbs instead of the
gritty urban center toilet flushing suburbs. We're flushing the toilets
in the suburbs. And the other reason is that galaxies
are super far apart, Like why doesn't our galaxy just
get gobbled up by black holes and other galaxies? Galaxies

(23:30):
are crazy far apart, and dark energy is pushing them
further and further apart. The deep future of the universe
might be that all these galaxies eventually collapse into their
own individual supermmmoth black hole. But then those black holes
won't merge if dark energy is keeping them apart. Yeah,
that's interesting. I guess I hadn't thought about it before,
because you know, our Sun is kind of like a

(23:50):
black hole. It is like a giant source of gravity,
and if you think about it, we we don't get
sucked right into it. We we are like in an
equilibrium with our son and the rest of the Solar System. Yeah,
and we did a whole podcast episode about like what
would happen if you replaced the Sun with the black
hole of the same mass, And the answer is it
would get darker, but we would keep orbiting because you

(24:12):
still just have the gravity of the black hole pulling
on the Earth, and it pulls on the Earth the
same way any other object of that mass does. Black
Holes don't have a special power to suck you in.
They just have gravity, and you can resist gravity by rotating,
running really fast, basically in the sideways direction. Yeah. So,
so the Earth is, you know, getting pulled on by
the Sun, but it keeps missing right, and it misses

(24:33):
again and mrs again. It's like constantly falling towards the
Sun and missing right right. It's like a lasso like
the Wonder Woman. Lesso. Alright, let's have a mini podcast
episode inside this one about Wonder Woman. Get that out
of your system. Let's move on. Alright. Well, so I
guess the question is, does that mean that the black
holes last forever? You know? Can they just keep going

(24:55):
and technically they'll outlast everything else in the universe with
the universe of actually just be black holes. That's a
great question. And you know, as I said before, if
you keep feeding a black hole, it will keep growing
and growing and growing. But another question is what happens
if a black hole stops being fed? So you have
like a black hole in the middle of space and
nobody feeds it anymore. You know, you go on vacation

(25:17):
and you don't feed that black hole in your backyard.
Will it last forever or will it eventually fall apart?
I see, if you starve the black hole, does it
eventually with or die? Yeah? And it turns out that
black holes not actually black. There's they give off the
tiniest little glow and that glow means they're giving away energy.

(25:39):
So if you don't feed it, eventually that glow will
leak out all the energy the black hole and it
will evaporate. Yeah, this is a this Stephen, it's called
Hawking radiation, right, it's it's it's he came up with
this idea that black holes are actually leaking like they're
not air tight. He was the first one to think
about black holes from a thermodynamic point of view, because

(26:01):
from a point of view of like thermodynamics, everything in
the universe has a temperature, and everything that has a
temperature glows and it gives off radiation depending on that temperature.
It's called black body radiation. We can do a whole
other podcast about it. So his question was, like, what
is the temperature of a black hole. If it's not zero,
it must be radiating. And if it's radiating, where is

(26:22):
that coming from? And that was the you know, a
year of his life figuring that out. Wow, can you
imagine the moment he thought of that question, like, I
wonder what the temperature of a black hole is. It's
actually pretty well documented. He was on a trip, I
think in Moscow, and a couple of Soviet scientists asked
him that question. They're like, hey, what do you think
is the temperature of a black hole? We think it

(26:43):
might not be zero. And they had this moment and
he's like, oh my gosh. And they went off and
scribbled his notebooks for a year and figured it out. Well,
this is something I never quite understood about Hawking radiation.
So the idea is that at the very border of
a black hole, like the border of the event horizon
or like the you know, the point where nothing can
escape in the idea is that the universe creates a
particle there out of nothingness and it splits off, right,

(27:07):
that's the idea, Like one half goes out, one half
goes in, and somehow we call that evaporation. Can you
explain that a little bit for me. Yeah, So this
is a tricky concept, and formally it comes from requiring
that black holes have a temperature and then trying to
figure out what that temperature is and and finding a
way to make that consistent for different observers moving at

(27:28):
different speeds. It's very complicated. And then there's the sort
of pseudo science hand wavy explanation that you often hear
about Hawking radiation and that's that. That's what I just said.
That's the way you just said, and it doesn't quite
perfectly make sense, but it's a fine way to think
about it. So there's an introduction to the topic, alright,

(27:50):
and the idea is you have a little blob of
space just outside the event horizon, not inside, right, anything
that's inside the event horizon will never leave. You have
this lava space just out side, and then you have
this gravitational force from the black hole. It's incredible gravitational power,
and then blob of space borrows a little bit of
that energy and it gives it a fluctuation and turns

(28:11):
it into a particle. Okay, so you're you're getting like
a boost of energy from this gravitational field. That boost
turns you into a particle, and that particle splits into
you know, two other particles, matter and antimatter. One of
them falls into the black hole, and by conservation momentum,
the other one has to go the other direction, so
it goes away from the black hole, and so it escapes.

(28:31):
And so what you have is basically a blob of
energy that originally was inside the black hole because it
came from the gravitational field of the black hole, and
that energy is now leaving with this particle that's gone, right,
And so the mass of the black hole essentially comes
from its energy. And so if it has to give
up some energy to boost away this other new particle,

(28:52):
then it's lost some of its mass. Oh I see,
it loses the energy when it creates this particle. Yeah,
it's energy gets used to create this particle and then
it loses one of it and and doesn't come back.
And remember that the mass of an object equals mc square.
That tells you that the mass of an object comes
from its stored internal energy, and so if it gives
up some of its energy, then it loses some mass.

(29:15):
And so it's not like something that was inside the
event horizon actually escaped, but some of that you stolen
some of the energy from the black hole. Oh, I see,
it's about the one that got away, not not about
the one that went into the black hole. It's like
the story again, No, it's a heartbreaking story here because
they broke they broke up, and they never got back together.

(29:37):
That's sort of a way to think about how a
black hole could lose some of its energy, which is
another way to think about you know, warm objects radiating
like black body radiation shouldn't be something weird and particle physics.
He's just like if you have something hot on your stovetop,
it glows, right, it gives off energy. So anything that
has a temperature it is glowing is diffusing energy out.
So the idea is, well, black holes have a lot

(29:59):
of energy, so why don't they lose some of that
also into the outside universe. And this is like a
little picture of how microscopically that might happen, right, And
so the ideas of the black hole is at the
very surface kind of emitting light or photons, and that
energy that's going away from the black hole, which means
that eventually it's like a candle will eventually maybe burn out. Yeah,

(30:21):
and it's not just light. It can give off any
kind of particle. Hawking radiation can produce positrons and electrons
or muans and anti muans. And that's actually one of
the cool things about black holes that we might be
making it cern is that if you make a tiny
little black hole at CERN, it will evaporates super quickly
and will evaporate into every kind of particle that's out
there through hawking radiation. So the signature of a black

(30:43):
hole in a collider is this like crazy spray of
a huge variety of particles. Nothing else makes that, which
is why black holes and colliders are so fascinating to
look for. Al Right, well, I guess the main lesson
is that black holes don't live forever. That's right. But
it's a very very slow process. You have some enormous
black hole. This is a it's pretty black, so it's

(31:06):
leaking a tiny tiny bit of energy. All right, Let's
get into how slow are black holes dying on their own?
How how slow they're getting snuffed out? And also if
we needed to accelerate the process, could we actually do
something to destroy a black hole? But first, let's take
a quick break, all right, Daniel. So black holes evaporate slowly,

(31:39):
meaning they give up a little bit of light and
energy just sitting there if you don't feed them, which
means that eventually a black hole sort of shrink down
into nothingness basically, right, that's right. If you have a
black hole, pet and you're going on a long vacation,
you do need to arrange somebody to feed it, otherwise
it will not be a runaways and this threde Earth

(32:01):
is what they're saying. Yeah, so depending on your motivations,
their evil villain or savior, make your decisions. But it
takes a very long time if you had a black
hole like the mass of the sun. And we've never
seen a black hole as small as the sun. The
smallest black hole we've ever seen is many times the
size of the sun. But even the black hole with
the mass of the sun would take ten to the

(32:23):
sixties seven years to evaporate. Oh what ten to the
is there even a name for a number of that
big ten? Because like the age of the universe is
not that long, or the size of the universe is
not that big. No, the universe, remember, age is in billions,
which the tens billions, so it's like ten to the ten, right,

(32:44):
because a billion is ten to the nine and the
universe is thirteen point eight billion years old, so we're like,
you know, ten to the ten years into the universe,
this is ten to the fifty seven times as long.
So basically they live forever because there, I mean, that's
sounds crazy to me. And think about being still alive

(33:04):
then or you know the universe what the universe might
look like at that point. Yeah, but remember we have
no idea what the time scale for the universe is. Like,
you know, a hundred thousand years into the universe, um,
lasting billions of years might have seemed crazy. Um. And
so you know, only if ten billion years into the universe,
maybe this is still basically the first flash and the

(33:25):
universe will last for ten to the one hundred years.
We just don't know. Can you imagine some aliens at
ten a year ten to the one quick? Hey, remember
back then when there were all these black holes everywhere? Yeah,
I used to listen to this great podcast back then.
What happened to those guys? They evaporated like everything else.
It's called hawking cancelation of your podcast. But the more

(33:48):
mass of the black hole the longer it takes. So
if you have a smaller black hole or evaporates more quickly,
which is why, for example, black holes we make it
cern if we do make them, which super tiny like
the mass or proton, would evaporate super quickly. Even like
a black hole that's like two hundred tons of stuff,
we'd only take about one second to evaporated. Wow, that's amazing.

(34:10):
So if you take two and thirty tons and make
up a black hole, that would be massive, but it
would only last one second. Yeah, it would evaporate away
in just a second. So the thing that black holes
need to do to survive is to eat, right, the
bigger they get, the longer they will last, because the
slower they will evaporate. All right, So the black holes
don't last forever, but they last a very long time,

(34:34):
practically forever. And so the question now is Daniel, if
a black hole came towards us and threaten the existence
of our solar system and our way of life, could
we destroy a black hole? Then? What can we do
to accelerate the destorction of a black hole? It's pretty tough. Um,
I got three ideas. I'm not sure any of them

(34:54):
are going to work though. Wait, these are your ideas
or like the scientific community or I are you saying
I don't speak for the sign of the community. Is
this the Royal wheel or is this the Daniel Daniel
and his basement ideas. I have gathered together all the
ideas that are out there, and I speak for the scientists.
You know, I'm wearing a white lab coat. I'm on

(35:16):
the news. Here are the best ideas from all the songs. Good, Okay,
I just want to I just want to make sure
first idea is a bad idea. It's sort of the
Bruce Willis of ideas, and that's um let's nuke it, right,
We've got these powerful weapons. Every time something comes to
endanger the Earth in movies at least, they just like
shoot up a nuke and try to blow it up, right,

(35:37):
like break it up like this disrupted. Yeah, Because the
idea is the black hole comes from its density, So
if you could somehow like crack it in half, then
maybe you could weaken its power, right you well, I
guess technically, right, like if you take a black hole
and split it in the middle and separated the two
um hows, it would sort of dissipate the black hole

(35:59):
right with like because the density would go down eventually.
And also it depends exactly on the structure of the
matter inside the black hole. If it's if general relativity
is correct and black holes have a singularity inside them,
then you know, splitting them in half just makes two
smaller black holes. You can't actually get rid of the
black holiness. But if there's some distribution of stuff and

(36:20):
you can break in half, then you can lower the
density enough. If quantum mechanics is right, then it has
to be distributed a bit. You could lower the density
enough and maybe you could stop it from being a
black hole. All right, So then is it possible to
break one up and blow it up? No, it's totally
not possible, and it would backfire dramatically in act three
of this screenplay, because you're basically just throwing fuel on

(36:42):
the fire. A black hole is not just a collection
of mass, it's energy. At the math the mass and
the black hole comes from its energy. So if you
just pour more energy into it, like a nuclear bomb
has a lot of energy, it just makes it stronger.
Oh man, it's like um, It's like at Supervillain that
takes all your punches and transforms them into energy that

(37:04):
the shoot you back with. It's exactly like that. It's
like you know, you've got a pile of glue and
you're pouring more glue onto it, right, it doesn't help.
So like even if I throw a giant bomb and
it explodes inside of the event horizon, it wouldn't help
break things apart, No, it would just make it more dense.
And remember, nothing can leave the event horizon. So even

(37:24):
if it blows up inside the event horizon, it's still
just going to be an exploding nuclear weapon inside the
event horizon, making the mass of the black hole larger. Right,
it won't blow it up. Nothing can leave, and so
it makes it more intense. Even if you threw a
star into a black hole, right, which is basically a
huge bomb. Oh wow, okay, hold on, yeah, somebody tell

(37:45):
prison Billiss too that we're canceling the plan where all right, yeah, yeah,
you're you're saying his agent is not gonna be happy
with that. It's basically nothing, no matter or energy can
break it up because it's alreadio dense collection of matter
and energy. And even thought, you know, what if you
threw like another black hole into it. But this time

(38:06):
it's an antimatter black hole. What it was like an
anti black hole mate out of entire where you fed
as a little kid with antimatter. That's right, yeah, because
matter antimatter and matter and both matter, and so in
principle you could make a black hole out of pure antimatter.
But again, it's just more energy. So you throw an

(38:28):
antimatter black hole into a matter black hole, and you're
just gonna pour more energy into It's gonna make a
stronger black hole. It doesn't matter what kind of matter
you put into it. Oh man, this is giving me
nightmares here. Let's um, it's making me really uncomfortable for
some reason, like the but like um, like some villain.
You can't stop um. But so that's a bad idea

(38:50):
to try to blow it up to give it more energy.
What are some of the other ideas? All right, So
there's some other ideas that involved trying to make the
black hole spin. Black Holes are dense blobs of stuff, right,
but some of them we think are spinning, not necessarily,
and they don't all have to spin, but some of
them can spin. You mean inside whatever is happening inside

(39:10):
it has some sort of rotation of the momentum to
it precisely, because angular momentum can't go away. And so
something falls into a black hole and it was originally
spinning around it. It's still spinning around the center of
mass when it goes inside the event horizon. So the
overall rotation of the black hole reflects the overall rotation
of the stuff originally. That's why, like the Solar system

(39:31):
is still spinning because angular momentum from the initial gas
cloud is still here. So if our solar system eventually
becomes a black hole, it will be spinning. Wow. But
we don't know what's going on inside the event horizon though.
Do we know for sure that they can still keep,
you know, spinning energy. We don't know for sure, but
we're pretty sure that angular momentum is conserved in our universe,

(39:52):
so it's a pretty fair assumption. And the fascinating thing
is that the size of the black hole depends not
just on the mass of the stuff inside of it,
but also on this rate of spin, And the faster
the black hole spinning, the smaller the event horizon. Yeah,
so the idea is maybe you could like shrink the
event horizon by making the black hole over spin. You

(40:13):
could like drop stuff into it that has a really
high spin rate, like going really fast, almost tangent to
the event horizon. Right, Like if you want, if you're
pushing someone on the merriga around, you want to make
them go faster, or you give them a little push
on the edge and you can you could overspin it. Maybe.
So if we take all those spinning toys that kids
were playing with a couple of years ago, you know,

(40:35):
the ones that would with the ball bearings, fidget spinners
save if you take all those fidget spinners that were
a huge fat and you talk about give it to
Bruce Willis to deliver, let's get back on the ship.
We have a new idea. Fidget spinners. You're saying, but

(40:56):
that's basically is right. I mean you're saying, if you
give throw up to stuff in there that has a
lot of spin, and it might shrink the black hole. Yeah,
and this is crazy, This is a theoretical idea nobody
knows who would actually work. But if you did that,
you might be thinking, but the mass is still there, right,
wouldn't you still have a singularity even if it's spinning.
The answer is yes, potentially you could take a black

(41:18):
hole and turn it into what we call a naked singularity,
which is a singularity without basically an event horizon around it.
Nobody knows what that would look like, what it would
be like, and if it would be any better or
worse than having a black hole nearby. Well, having him
naked anything, um, you know, makes things that screenplay. Yeah, yeah,

(41:40):
that's why you know. That's that's what got paramount interest
did in our screenplay. I feel like that's a spoof
version of the Bruce Willis movie Singularity. Nobody knows if
it would work, and nobody knows it would be better
or worse, you know, than just suffering through the destruction
the original black hole. But in theory, it might be

(42:01):
possible to overspin the black hole and turn it into
a naked singularity. Okay, but we don't know that might
be better or worse. We don't know, yeah exactly, but technically, right,
if you hire me to destroy your black hole and
then I turned into a naked singularity, I'm gonna be
invoicing you, all right, and I'm sure we'll gladly pay

(42:25):
that if we're still alive from your naked singularity. Um.
And then the last idea actually came from a listener. Really,
so you have one listener asking a question and you
had another listener answer the question. Yeah. Another listener spontaneously
wrote in with an idea for how to destroy black
holes and wanted to know if it would work. And
I thought, Oh, I'm trying to figure out how we

(42:48):
could destroy black that's a little suspicious. I feel like
these two guys are two people are playing you here, Daniel. Oh,
maybe they're just different. One is an alter ego of
the other one. When is the anti black hole version
of there no? James Castile from Indiana, he wrote in
asking about dark energy because remember dark energy is expanding

(43:10):
space and so it's essentially diluting everything. So he wanted
to know is dark energy happening inside black holes? And
if so, could it like expand the space inside a
black hole enough to basically shrink the density so you
no longer have a black hole? Oh clever, like eat
the black hole from the inside out. Yeah, I remember

(43:31):
a black hole ate a star from an inside out.
So it's like, so to turn its own strategy back
on itself, Yeah, like blow it up from the inside
through space itself. Yeah, exactly, so great idea, James. And
when we do want to build a black hole gun,
you were definitely invited to be on the task. He
can pull the trigger. You pressed the big red button.

(43:54):
But it is so, is there something to this idea?
Could you make like a dark energy gun or array
or bomb and to expand the space inside of a
black hole? Well, there are a lot of problems with
this idea. Number one is we don't understand what dark
energy is like at all. We we think it's some
property of space that when you have various configurations of

(44:16):
matter in the universe, it causes space to expand. But
it's it's very it's actually very very weak. It's not
very powerful at all. It only adds up to a
big effect because space is so huge. A dark energy,
for example, plays no role in the structure of our
solar system because the gravity of our solar system is
powerful enough to overcome dark energy, and so when it
comes to a black hole, dark energy is basically negligible,

(44:39):
has no effect at all. Yeah, but it is everywhere
like love. It's everywhere like love. But we don't actually
know if there is dark energy inside a black hole
because we don't know what dark energy is. If it's
a property of space itself, then you have there's some
effect from dark energy inside a black hole, But we
don't know if it means the expansion of space, right
and anyways, it would be each weaker than the gravity

(45:01):
that's keeping the black hole together. Dark energy is just
one factor. And to answer whether space is expanding, you
have to fold in dark energy. You have to fold
in the matter and the radiation density the universe. Then
you crank get through general relativity equations to discover whether
or not you're getting expansion. The reason there's expansion out
there in space is because dark energy is the only
thing out there. But if you have matter and energy

(45:22):
like in a black hole, then you're not going to
get expansion, right. But I guess the question is the
idea is that, you know, maybe one day will understand
what dark energy is. Maybe one day we might be
able to harness it or concentrate it. You know, like
if there is something out there in space in the
universe that can expand space, maybe that's one way to
kill a black hole. Is like if we understand that,

(45:45):
maybe we can make something that will expand the space
inside of a black hole. Mm hm, I lost count
of how many maybes you uns there? This is Hollywood, man,
it doesn't you can fill those. We can build a
dark energy gun and give it to Bruce willis the Yeah,
this plant is rock solid. But the point you make
is the point you make is reasonable, right, is that
there is something that can balance gravity we described earlier

(46:07):
black holes or our runaway process, because gravity just takes
over and eventually, um wins because it's always attractive. But
you're right, we do know that there is something about
gravity that can be repulsive, and that's dark energy, and
so right, eventually, if we understand it, we might be
able to manipulate it and cause black holes to fall
apart from the inside using dark energy. But there's a
lot of maybes between now and then, right, all right,

(46:29):
So it sounds like our best ideas are fidget spinners
and uh, magical unicorns is our base idea here. Yeah,
magical uniforms is definitely a good idea. Magical unicorn being
written by Bruce willis to save the universe. Welcome to

(46:53):
our pitch. Thank you for coming to our pitch. We'll
take those millions of dollars now, Thank you. That's right.
We want a big advance. We're not delivering this script
until the end of the universe. Alright, Well, I guess
I mean to answer the question, can we destroy a
black hole? It sort of sounds like maybe not. I mean,
it sounds like we have some wild ideas, but so

(47:14):
far they seem like a pretty inevitable part of the
universe that will basically be around here forever and maybe
never go away. Yeah. If I had to bet on
the most likely fate of the universe, it would be
a bunch of galaxies that collapsed into black holes, separated
by vast distances. So it's pretty dark and bleak version

(47:36):
of the future. Well, we hope that stimulated some thinking
out there and you guys about what black holes are
and whether they'll be around for a very long time,
or whether we could destroy one if we had the
need to, and whether or not it was a good
idea to start a little black hole pet in your backyard.
That's right, And just in case, save those fidget spinners.

(47:57):
They might come in handy later. And any be out
there with a magical unicorn please get in touch. Yeah,
so this is a great question, and so if you
guys have a question out there, please send it to us.
What's the email address Daniel Questions at Daniel and Jorge
dot com. That's right, and you can also write to
Daniel on Twitter and I'm doing the Instagram for this podcast,

(48:17):
which explains why some of the answers in in the
comments are coming from a cartoonist basically a physicist. You're
a deputized physicist by yeah, so you can find on
this um both at Daniel and Jorge's at Daniel and Jorge.
Thanks for sending in questions and thanks for your attention.
See you next time. Before you still have a question

(48:46):
after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line.
We'd love to hear from you. You can find us
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(49:08):
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