Kind: captions
Language: en
black holes tease me it's my disposition
to be drawn to the invisible the
untouchable and no matter how well you
understand them they remain unreachable
the perfect cosmic teaser for me
I'm freeIn brother Natarajan theoretical
astrophysicist so I was obsessed with
atlases when I was young all kinds of
maps but in particular celestial and
terrestrial maps I was very young you
know I looked through a telescope and a
microscope and I had decided that it was
the telescope there was something about
the cosmos being a little bit out of
reach it really attracted me but you
know my first foray into research was
when my dad brought me a Commodore 64
this completely dates me and this was a
time when it was not common for a kid in
India to have her own computer I taught
myself how to program and I was itching
to do something the narrow planetarium
in New Delhi where I grew up had a new
director I showed up at her office and I
said can I solve a problem you know I
have this computer and I know how to
program it so she said well given that
you're a bit of a map not to write a
program that would generate a star chart
it was a hard problem and I sat down for
six weeks I wrote the program
she's didn't quite believe I had done it
she said well Korea this is great but
what if you move to Boston or to
Brisbane wouldn't you want to know the
night sky there I said dr. Raghavan
don't worry punch in the latitude and
the longitude of any place on earth and
I can fought the star chart for you she
was pretty stunned these were not things
no one had figured out before right but
I was figuring them out for the first
time I was hooked
[Music]
black holes started out as a solution to
Einstein's equations and the mathematics
gave you this very elegant very very
compact object the singularity that
fundamental limit were all known laws of
physics break down nothingness it's both
infinitely large or infinitely small the
mathematical solution was really
beautiful so mathematician would think
that a black hole was a very elegant
object whereas a physicist would find
them very awkward physically unnatural
both the concept of zero and the concept
of infinity a very problematic it's very
hard to imagine nothingness in fact
Einstein did not believe that they were
actually real they thought it was just a
mathematical curiosity so it took a long
time for people to even start looking
for them
and since slack holes were discovered
we've been routinely finding them the
universe is replete with black holes we
now have a whole range of masses and
sizes we've detected all the black holes
in the center of our galaxy and nearby
galaxies
they are breathing violent fire eating
demons so complex it's so richly
structured they wish our knowing to the
limits enticing us to want to know more