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Comment by a_d | Hacker News Reader

Previous work on this was done for the movie Interstellar. The resolution of the rendering software was so high that team members were able to examine the black hole very closely - Because Gargantua was spinning at almost the speed of light, the rendering showed that spacetime warped into shapes never seen before. This led to the publication of —> https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.03808

Kip Thorne describes his work not this in a book called the science of interstellar.

Kip’s description of black holes here is also fascinating: https://youtu.be/oj1AfkPQa6M — first time I learnt what “warped” space-time means :)

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Sean Caroll has a great podcast, mindscape [0]. One of the recent episode featured Kip Thorne as a guest and had some great discussions about Gravitational Waves, Time Travel, and Interstellar [1]. It's a very informative and entertaining podcast, I recommend it.

[0] https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/

[1] https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2018/11/26/epis...

Agree with the recommendation.

Kip has studied black holes all his life — this podcast goes into the work on LIGO that finally got Kip (and collaborators) the Nobel Prize. I found it amusing that there is some “Nobel guilt” for scientists that comes with the prize, because the size of them teams that usually collaborate and make a large project like LIGO happen (over 20 years) is incredibly large.

I also find it inspiring that Kip speaks with so much... love ... about warped space time :)

There is a video that I cannot find where Christopher Nolan describes the process of rendering the black hole for his movie - they used Kip’s equations to render Gargantua and when the first images were seen, he realized that Kip has never actually seen a black hole before - even though he has spent his entire life studying it.

Wow, that brings me back. I studied GR under Robert Brandenberger, and we used Caroll's book. What a wonderful text.

Definitely going to listen to his podcast!

> Kip’s description of black holes here is also fascinating: https://youtu.be/oj1AfkPQa6M — first time I learnt what “warped” space-time means :)

In this video he makes a comment which I struggle to fully understand:

He says that ALL of the matter which belonged to the cooled-off star is DESTROYED in the process of creating a black hole.

That concept of complete destruction eludes me. I assume what he means is, the matter was converted entirely to energy. Right?

But if that's true - where is all of that energy? Is it stored (somehow?) in the Black Hole? Is it dispersed throughout the galaxy? What HAPPENED to the mass (energy)?

It's all squished into the black hole and from the perspective of everyone outside, converted into... more mass of the black hole. The mass of the black hole comes from the mass that created it. As you feed it more stuff, it gets more massive.

As to what physically happens to the stuff once it's inside, I don't know if we know for certain. It gets dragged towards the center. From the point of view of the rest of the universe, it might never actually reach the singularity: GR would make it look like it's going slower and slower and slower.

Speculation about what is actually inside the event horizon is at most mathematical extrapolation, since we can't actually crack one open and look.

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