Interview by Jack Speardime
August 2019
The New Observer
JACK: Hello Stanley, thanks for taking the time.
STANLEY: My pleasure.
JACK: Please tell us in laymen's terms, what is a black hole?
STANLEY: Of course. Black holes are points in space. But these are not just points. They are so dense they create deep gravity sinks. Beyond a certain region, not even light can escape the powerful tug of a black hole's gravity. And anything that ventures too close—be it a star, planet, or spacecraft—will be stretched and compressed like putty in a theoretical process aptly known as spaghettification.
JACK: Is that a real scientific term?
STANLEY: It is now.
JACK: Now, where do black holes come from?
STANLEY: Usually, it's because a star dies. Its mass becomes so large, it implodes and collapses in on itself. If you're familiar with spacetime – that's not me, that's Einstein – you can understand it better. Imagine that the whole spacetime, which is three dimensions you know plus time, is a sheet of paper. Now put a heavy ball of paper. It will create a dent in the sheet. That's what gravity is, in simple terms, a contortion of spacetime. All smaller balls will naturally slide towards it. Now imagine putting an extremely heavy ball – so heavy, that it rips the paper sheet, creating a hole. Now that's a black hole.
JACK: Wow. Great analogy. Thanks. Does this mean our star will become a black hole one day?
STANLEY: Or a white dwarf. Depends.
JACK: Should we fear that a black hole eats us alive anytime soon?
STANLEY: I doubt it. Although, the more you learn science, the more you realise: everything is possible.
JACK: Are there different types of black holes?
STANLEY: Yes. There are stellar ones, that's when a sun dies. And there are supermassive black holes, like that song by Muse, they are located in the center of the galaxy. Also, we're working on a third type of black hole, miniature black holes, or Micro Black Holes, as we also call them with my partners back at Large Hadron Collider in Geneva.
JACK: What do you mean 'working on'?
STANELY: We're trying to create black holes by colliding particles at extreme velocities. That's how they've found the Higg's Boson in 2011.
JACK: Can that be dangerous?
STANLEY: Potentially. But there is a theory that states such mini black holes were prevalent in the early days of our Universe, right after the Big Bang, when the space environment was much more dense. Right. Now we're trying to replicate some of that to study not just black holes themselves, but the origins of our Universe.
JACK: Whose theory is that?
STANLEY: Mine.
JACK: I see. But won't the black hole create in the collider suck everything in it?
STANLEY: First of all, black holes are not vacuum cleaners. Not quite. They don't suck anything as fast. Not unless you go beyond the event horizon – a so-called 'point of no return.' In fact, if we were to conduct a thought experiment and replace our Sun with a black hole, nothing much would change. We would still keep spinning in roughly the same place, except that it would get a bit too cold and hot for us to exist...And second, there's another theory that states that black holes evaporate at the velocity in reverse proportion to their size. Meaning, the smaller the black hole, the faster it evaporates. We called this concept the Doyle Radiation.
JACK: Doyle Radiation, as in Stanley Doyle?
STANLEY: Yes. Doyle Radiation is black-body radiation that is predicted to be released by black holes, due to quantum effects near the black hole event horizon. Because black holes emit such radiation, they are slowly decaying. And if the black hole is the size, or I should say, mass – as size is a relative concept when it comes to space – of your hand, it won't exist long. I am working on a paper right now, soon to be published where I will prove it.
JACK: Well, we wish you a good luck! But still, I am curious. If we were to create a black hole the size of a nickel. What would that look like?
STANLEY: That's precisely what we're trying to find out. The thing is, if the black hole was the diameter – not a mass – of a nickel, which is about ten millimetres from end to end, we'd have a very-very massive black hole. In fact, its mass would be exceeding, albeit slightly, the mass of the Earth itself...About ten to the power of twenty-four kilograms, to be exact. Yes. And that would mean bad things for us.
JACK: Like what?
STANLEY: Like sucking in everything, including the planet. Because the black hole's mass is bigger than the mass of the Earth, it would suck in our planet as well. And then make some serious changes in our Solar System. And if you were to put this nickel-sized black hole in your pocket, you'd die instantly before you even realized what had happened. The black hole would suck you in. And not just suck, but its tidal gravitational force would be so strong, it would rip your cells apart...You'd be like toothpaste coming from a tube. And then, the more the black hole eats up objects, the bigger it becomes. It would roughly double its size after consuming the Earth, and the Moon would begin circling it. So yeah.
JACK: Not something we'd prefer, I guess.
STANLEY: No, definitely not.
JACK: Okay then! I have no further questions. Thank you for this interview. Let's hope this won't happen. Not in the next millions of years, at least.
STANLEY: My pleasure.
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