What Would Happen if We Were About 1 pc Away from a Supermassive Black Hole?

What Can We Learn about Black-hole Formation from Black-hole X-ray Binaries?

I discuss the effect of the formation of a black hole on a (close) binary and show some of the current constraints that the observed properties of black hole X-ray binaries put on the formation of black holes. In particular I discuss the evidence for and against asymmetric kicks imparted on the black hole at formation and find contradicting answers, as there seems to be evidence for kick for in...

What would happen to education if we take education evidence seriously?

Educational practice and educational research are not aligned with each other. Current educational practice heavily relies on information transmission or content delivery to learners. Yet evidence shows that delivery is only a minor part of learning. To illustrate the directions we might take to find better educational strategies, six areas of educational evidence are briefly reviewed. The flip...

What would be conserved if "the tape were played twice"?

We develop an abstract chemistry, implemented in a lambda-calculus-based modeling platform, and argue that the following features are generic to this particular abstraction of chemistry; hence, they would be expected to reappear if "the tape were run twice": (i) hypercycles of self-reproducing objects arise; (ii) if self-replication is inhibited, self-maintaining organizations arise; and (iii) ...

What would you do if it were your kid?

What We Don’t Know about BTZ Black Hole Entropy

With the recent discovery that many aspects of black hole thermodynamics can be effectively reduced to problems in three spacetime dimensions, it has become increasingly important to understand the “statistical mechanics” of the (2+1)-dimensional black hole of Bañados, Teitelboim, and Zanelli (BTZ). Several conformal field theoretic derivations of the BTZ entropy exist, but none is completely s...