Nathaniel Strauss’s Comps Presentation
Monday, April 11th
8:30 am in Olin 04
The Thermodynamics of Black Holes: Energy and Quantum Mechanics in Spacetime
The second law of thermodynamics states that every physical system has some entropy which always increases, but what happens to that entropy when we throw the system into a black hole? In this talk I give a summary of the modern physicist’s best answer to that question. The derivation of the entropy of a black hole is a marriage
between two seemingly disparate elds of physics: general relativity and quantum mechanics. The argument hinges upon the existence of Hawking radiation, an interaction between quantum vacuum fluctuations and the spacetime surrounding a black hole, which causes the black hole to radiate particles. The modern thermodynamic descrip-
tion of a black hole is far from complete, but it is an active area of theoretical research and could eventually lead to a so-called “theory of everything”.