Andrea M. Ghez Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Black holes destroy any objects that happen to fall victim to their gravitational pull.

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

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.

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.

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.

A black hole really is an object with very rich structure, just like Earth has a rich structure of mountains, valleys, oceans, and so forth. Its warped space whirls around the central singularity like air in a tornado.

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?

Do you realize that if you fall into a black hole, you will see the entire future of the Universe unfold in front of you in a matter of moments and you will emerge into another space-time created by the singularity of the black hole you just fell into?

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.