Date/Time
Date(s) - 04/06/2007
3:00 pm - 4:00 pm

Title: Dumb Holes

Speaker: Dr. Bill Unruh

Institute: University of British Columbia

Location: ABB 102

Description:

Black holes were called “Einstein’s outrageous legacy” by Kip Thorne. But the discovery that black holes had a quantum instability which caused them to evaporate was an even more surprizing discovery by Hawking in the mid ’70s. However Hawking’s derivation of the effect is apparent non-sense since it relies on believing the theory in areas where it is clearly wrong. So do black holes evaporate? In 1980 I discovered that dumb holes, the sonic analog of black holes, could be used as a testing ground of the prediction, and showed in the 90s that they would be expected also to radiate thermal radiation in exactly the same way as black holes do. This gives one an alternative viewport into the theory, to try to understand what feature of black holes is really responsible for their radiation. It may also cast some light on the so called information paradox– is the entropy of black holes an inherent property or does it arise from statistical mechanical features of black holes, as we believe it does for most other systems?