CTC scientists star in new film on black holes
Scientists from the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology, including Stephen Hawking, star in a recently-released documentary on black holes. The film, Black Holes: The Edge of All We Know, was four years in the making and follows the efforts of two scientific teams as they attempt to understand the most mysterious objects in the universe. Many of the scenes were shot before Stephen Hawking’s death in early 2018, and show him collaborating with fellow CTC researchers Professor Malcolm Perry and Sasha Haco (then a PhD student) as well as Harvard’s Andrew Strominger, a long-term colleague of Professor Hawking and a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee of the CTC since its inception in 2007.
The film is particularly concerned with the so-called black hole information paradox. This is a longstanding problem in theoretical physics which results from work done by Stephen Hawking in the 1970s. The discovery of Hawking radiation suggests that physical information could permanently disappear inside a black hole, violating a core principle of quantum physics. Various solutions to the paradox have been proposed over the years, and scientists believe they may be close to cracking the problem once and for all.
Black Holes: The Edge of All We Know can be seen on Netflix and Apple TV, and is also available on DVD and Blu-Ray.
