Kevin McCarthy Quotes

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.

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

Fortunately, most things around the supermassive black hole are just going to go around it. They're going to orbit it. They don't actually get sucked in.

Black holes can bang against space-time as mallets on a drum and have a very characteristic song.

A lot of the things you see in science fiction revolve around black holes because black holes are strong enough to rip the fabric of space and time.

Black holes are enigmatic astronomical objects, areas where the gravity is so immense that it has warped spacetime so that not even light can escape.

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!

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.

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.

Black holes do not emit light, so you visualize them through gravitational lensing - how they bend light from other objects.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Each black hole spins on its axis like the Earth spins. That spin creates two vortexes of twisting space, somewhat like vortexes in a bathtub or a whirlpool.

Only black holes of very low mass would emit a significant amount of radiation.

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

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.

It's hard to know which stars in the sky will turn into black holes. And which ones will open up worm holes into entire new universes.

Black holes are very exotic objects. Technically, a black hole puts a huge amount of mass inside of zero volume. So our understanding of the center of black holes doesn't make sense, which is a big clue to physicists that we don't have our physics quite right.

One of the big mysteries about the black hole at the center of the galaxy is, 'Why don't we see emission from matter falling onto the black hole, or, rather, the black hole eating up its surroundings?'

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

We know about black holes and neutron stars, but we hope there are other phenomena we can see because of the gravitational waves they emit.

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