Andrea M. Ghez Quotes

If you go down through the horizon of a black hole, at the center you don't find a tunnel that leads you to some other place in the universe.

The black holes of nature are the most perfect macroscopic objects there are in the universe: the only elements in their construction are our concepts of space and time.

Einstein got most of the things right about black holes. I'm not an expert, I must admit.

Black holes provide theoreticians with an important theoretical laboratory to test ideas. Conditions within a black hole are so extreme, that by analyzing aspects of black holes we see space and time in an exotic environment, one that has shed important, and sometimes perplexing, new light on their fundamental nature.

We have this interesting problem with black holes. What is a black hole? It is a region of space where you have mass that's confined to zero volume, which means that the density is infinitely large, which means we have no way of describing, really, what a black hole is!

If space is a fabric, then of course fabrics can have ripples, which we have now seen directly. But fabrics can also rip. Then the question is what happens when the fabric of space and time is ripped by a black hole?

Gravitational waves will bring us exquisitely accurate maps of black holes - maps of their space-time. Those maps will make it crystal clear whether or not what we're dealing with are black holes as described by general relativity.

My work on black holes was on the connection between black holes and elementary particles.

Time can behave like another direction in space under extreme conditions.

Wormholes are a gravitational phenomena. Or imaginary gravitational phenomena, as the case may be.

Black holes are pretty scary when you ponder them. They seem nihilistic, infinitely destructive on an inconceivable scale, notwithstanding the ideas of Hawking radiation.

Black holes, we all know, are these regions where if an object falls in, it can't get out, but the puzzle that many struggled with over the decades is, what happens to the information that an object contains when it falls into a black hole. Is it simply lost?

General relativity predicts that time ends inside black holes because the gravitational collapse squeezes matter to infinite density.

Things changed with the discovery of neutron stars and black holes - objects with gravitational fields so intense that dramatic space and time-warping effects occur.

I used to think information was destroyed in black hole. This was my biggest blunder, or at least my biggest blunder in science.

How do you observe something you can't see? This is the basic question of somebody who's interested in finding and studying black holes. Because black holes are objects whose pull of gravity is so intense that nothing can escape it, not even light, so you can't see it directly.

A big misconception is that a black hole is made of matter that has just been compacted to a very small size. That's not true. A black hole is made from warped space and time.

The edge of a black hole, the event horizon, is a boundary that marks the point of no return. Once an object crosses the event horizon, it cannot escape and will be ripped to pieces, atom by atom.

My passion is to understand the non-linear dynamics of warped space-time, and the ideal venue for this is black-hole collisions.

The whole idea of gravity curling up space, that is the epitome of what is going on in a black hole. I would've loved to have seen Einstein's face if he were presented with the data that we actually discovered such a thing, because he himself probably didn't believe in much of it.

I arrived at Princeton as a graduate student from the University of Manitoba in 1958. To my great good fortune, I fell into work with Bob Dicke, a truly great physicist who decided a few years before that that gravity is too important to ignore, as it had been in recent years in physics.

The key to proving that there's a black hole is showing that there's a tremendous amount of mass in a very small volume. And you can do that with the motions of stars. The way the star moves around the center of the galaxy is very much like the way the planets orbit the sun.

I like science fiction and physics, things like that. Planets being sucked into black holes, and the various vortexes that create possibility, and what happens on the other side of the black hole. To me it's the microcosmic study of the macrocosmic universe in man, and that's why I'm attracted to it.

There are no black holes in the sense of regimes from which light can't escape to infinity.

Proof of the black hole is a tremendous amount of mass inside a very small volume. There's 4 million times the mass of our sun within a region that's comparable to the size of our solar system.