365 | Vitor Cardoso on Why Black Holes Are Special

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. I'm not sure if you know this, but if you're listening to this podcast, the week it is being published, it is Black Hole Week. I don't know if it's Black Hole Week. all over the world or even all throughout the galaxy, but in Copenhagen in the Netherlands, it is Black Hole Week. Black Hole Week is a thing that is sponsored by the center of gravity. Maybe it's the center for gravity, but it sounds sexier if it's a center of gravity, uh, at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. It started two years ago when they realized that two years ago was the 50th anniversary of Stephen Hawking showing that black holes actually emitted radiation and really changing our view of what black holes are. And they decided to make it uh a bi annual thing. Every two years they're gonna have

A celebration of black holes that lasts a week long in Copenhagen, and there's various events and so forth, hopefully catches on worldwide. I think the black holes are important enough that we could use them as an excuse to celebrate science and all the different ways that science intersects with our lives. And today's guest is the perfect person to talk to us about black holes. Vitor Cardoso is the director of the Center of Gravity at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. And the reason why he's the perfect person besides his title is that he is a theorist who sort of grew up thinking about how black holes work in general relativity and string theory and with particle physics and things like that. And in this modern era where we're having enormous amounts of data come in from gravitational wave observatories, from the Event Horizon telescope, and elsewhere that are teaching us about properties of black holes, he has been very active in that observational program as well, thinking about what we can learn. about black holes from the data that we're collecting. And I think that's why it's worth having a podcast episode about black holes in the middle of Black Hole Week because

The landscape is changing, you know, black holes are a different kind of thing now in the practice of science than they were just twenty years ago. Not only do we have enormous progress theoretically in thinking about how black holes work with quantum gravity and with other classical theories of gravity, the behavior of black holes in astrophysical situations, but we have all these new telescopes and observatories that are teaching us about them. So we're gonna do the basics of black holes, but then we're gonna get into what we're learning. Like what do you know that you didn't know when you see two black holes spiral together and you're catching their gravitational waves? What are the future prospects for new observatories? How does this all intersect with quantum gravity and other theories like that? The Scope of black hole physics is enormous and it's moving forward very quickly, so there's a lot to talk about. Let's go.

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