Black Holes Explained

Gregory Benford
Physicist and Author
University of California, Irvine
"People regard black holes as troubling, because they are the enemy you cannot defeat."

Running time 0:39

Roger Blandford
Astrophysicist
Stanford University
"Right at the heart of a black hole is the center nugget, which we call the singularity, and there we don't know what goes on."

Running time 0:30

David Brin
Physicist and Author
"If you stick your finger down in there, you ain't getting it back."

Running time 0:37

Reinhard Genzel
Astrophysicist
Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics
"Anything can be a black hole—it's just a matter of getting mass to be concentrated in a small enough volume."

Running time 0:33

Andrea Ghez
Astrophysicist
University of California, Los Angeles
"We don't know! We'd like to know, but we don't actually know."

Running time 0:47

Andrew Hamilton
Astronomer
University of Colorado, Boulder
"It's this monstrous, mysterious thing that, I don't know, eats everything."

Running time 0:58

Brian McNamara
Astronomer
Ohio University
"When something falls into a black hole, it is no longer accessible to our world."

Running time 0:37

Mark Morris
Physicist
University of California, Los Angeles
"Nothing can counteract the gravity and prevent it from collapsing completely to a point in space."

Running time 1:11

Steve Ritz
Astrophysicist
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center & University of Maryland
"It's enigmatic, because it represents the laws of physics in the most extreme environments that we can imagine."

Running time 0:56

Kip Thorne
Physicist
California Institute of Technology
"The common idea that a black hole is just made of very compacted matter—it's wrong. It is just simply wrong."

Running time 1:09

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Astrophysicist
American Museum of Natural History
"There's no better hole that you could possibly imagine than a black hole."

Running time 1:01

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Gregory Benford
Roger Blandford
David Brin
Reinhard Genzel
Andrea Ghez
Andrew Hamilton
Brian McNamara
Mark Morris
Steve Ritz
Kip Thorne
Neil deGrasse Tyson