BBC: Who's afraid of a big black hole?

Another episode about fundamental physics of the BBC 2 "Horizon" program, featuring people such as Andy Strominger (in a dark classroom of the Jefferson Lab and in his office), was aired in November 2009.




Here's the 59-minute video:



At the beginning, they edit a few interviews so that all the physicists say that no one understands black holes. A little bit over the edge but funny.

After 5:00, they switch to an astronomer who explains what stars and black holes are. He believes that a bright star went supernova and then it became a black hole because we see nothing there. ;-)

They switch to theorists at 8:40, Kaku, Strominger, Tegmark... History of black holes from Einstein. Kaku under skyscrapers about GR and gravity. Funny ancient TV "popularizations" of GR. Comments about black hole – hydrodynamics link. Tegmark tortured by waterfalls; nothing as dramatic as my talk about black hole event horizons while skydiving. ;-)

At 16:05, Tegmark says that we know that you may perfectly survive the crossing of the event horizon; no firewalls here. Inner horizon of a rotating black hole. At 19:20, the singularity is presented as a bug or monster of GR, Kaku.

21:45, Strominger, singularity means we don't know what to do. Less concisely, Tegmark says the same thing. Einstein wrote a paper that black holes couldn't arise, Krauss. 23:50, X-ray observations of black holes. Reinhard Genzel, a guy from the Max Planck Institute who was looking for certain BHs. Well, the galactic center BH. Using motion of stars around it. Won a $1 million astronomy prize. He gave it away and bought a new car.

30:55, Ramesh Narayan of Harvard-Smithsonian is comparing the BH with others. I actually covered his paper in an astronomy course at Rutgers – my talk was exactly about the evidence that there was a giant BH at the center of the Milky Way (two-temperature plasma etc.).

Lots of stellar black holes.

35:30 GR bad for the small world. Need quantum mechanics. Why Krauss? ;-) 36:50, Andy says that to understand the final fate of BHs, QM will be needed. Krauss misinterprets QM: "a particle can be at many points at the same time". It's just ain't the case. A particle may have nonzero probabilities to be at many points but we may still prove that there're just one point where the particle is although it's unknowable in principle before the measurement.

At 38:30, Andy says that QM describes everything, one can't escape it. All objects are quantum and the world is a quantum world. Most of the time, QM and GR are in peace. But there's an arena where they are in conflict, high-density, small size – inside BHs. "Quantum gravity" is said for the first time around 40:00. Kaku and Lagrangians. He sketches some toy UV divergence and adds big words to it. 42:30, Andy also talks about the breakdown of GR.

42:00 BHs – problems become opportunities, a next key, Andy. Linked to the Big Bang mysteries (singularity). Narayan, Andy, Krauss add a few words. We have no clues what QG is. And no one has seen a BH. The cameraman plays with the physicists' eyes, deforms their words (like near a black hole) etc.

50:20, a new telescope guy, Shep Doeleman of MIT. Computer-combines lots of telescope to get an image at a supercomputer. Huge increase of sharpness. Nerdy discussions with another empirical guy. Trying to see a horizon via shadows.

Sorry for these chaotic catchwords. It wasn't supposed to be a fully formatted text.

Verdict

It was a so so program. I find it very paradoxical that they haven't even tried to cover any new actual theory from the last 40 years. I mean, there was no black hole thermodynamics or string theory or information loss in the program. That's very paradoxical given the fact that Stephen Hawking is arguably the most recognized living scientist. What he's famous for among physicists has never been really covered by a popular program, or at least the number of such programs is infinitesimal.

And yes, I was annoyed by the highly repetitive occultist comments that everything about the black holes is completely mysterious and misunderstood. It's not really the case. Such programs help to reinforce the widespread laymen's misconception that physicists don't have a clue what they're doing and everyone could be employed as a physicist, too.