Black Holes – from Physics to Chemistry

You are invited to a special public lecture organised by the Central European Institute for Cosmology and Fundamental Physics (CEICO), the Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences and Faculty of Mathematics and Physics Charles University..

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The lecture will be delivered by Prof. Robert Mann, one of the world’s leading experts on gravitational physics and black holes. He is based at the University of Waterloo and the prestigious Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada.

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Water evaporates into steam, polymers change into glass, and helium can become a superfluid.  Remarkably, black holes can exhibit all these chemical phenomena and more! How is this possible?

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Black Holes are amongst the strangest objects in the universe.  They form from the collapse of matter into an object whose gravitational pull is so strong, nothing can escape from them.

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Yet a black hole also radiates heat like a blackbody, with a temperature equal to its  surface gravity, an entropy equal to its area, and an energy equal to its mass.  In recent years new research that takes into account the pressure of the vacuum  has  transformed our perspective on black holes.

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They behave like systems we see in chemistry laboratories: they can condense from a gas-like state into a liquid-like state, they can have transitions of the type seen in gels, polymers, and even superfluids, and they can even be turned into heat engines!  

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Prof. Robert Mann will outline the foundations of this “black hole chemistry” and highlight both the new phenomena that  have been recently discovered and their implications for our understanding of gravitational physics.‍

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Admission: Free

Language: English

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