An Interview with Professor Eliot Quataert: The Formation of Black Holes

Abstract

I nterview with P rofessor E liot Q uataert : T he F ormation of B lack H oles B S J Manraj Gill, Kevin Nuckolls, Saavan Patel, Georgia Kirn Berkeley Scientific Journal: How did you get into your specific field of study on stars and black holes? to know. It’s certainly possible I could have done some other type of physics. Dr. Quataert: I was, as a kid, always interested in physics and math, not from the tinkering point of view, but more from reading the scientific American type of articles. I was definitely more interested in the theoretical side of things when I was younger. When I was an undergraduate physics major at MIT, I knocked on 15 people’s doors asking about starting research... the first 14 people were particle theorists, string theorists and such, they all said I was a freshman so I should go away. Then I asked an astrophysicist and he said he had a project that might work out. So that’s how I got involved in research when I [hadn’t taken] any astrophysics courses as an undergraduate physics major. But I got involved in this astrophysics research! That was what really led me into this field of physics research. I knew I wanted to do physics research, I didn’t know what kind, and that’s what really tipped the scale. Within astrophysics, I like to work on a wide range of things. That’s one of the things that I think is great about specifically doing astrophysics research: you’re studying the entire universe. To do so you need all of physics, and you work on a wide range of problems using anything from simple algebra to simulations on massive supercomputers. BSJ: A lot of your research focuses on both the quantum world and the relativistic mechanical world, and how those mesh together. We were wondering how you incorporate both of those ideas in your research, and how you maintain consistency between the two worlds. BSJ: If it weren’t for any of the previous 14 professors… Q: That’s a really interesting question, I’ve wondered about that. I think I would have been doing physics, but it’s hard Q: That’s a good question! I would say most of the time, we usually take the laws of physics as given. We apply them, and are always on the lookout for when there are tensions between the known laws of physics. This is how people discovered dark matter and dark energy. The honest answer, at some level, when we use these laws of physics, we are not worried about conceptual tensions between quantum mechanics and classical mechanics, or quantum mechanics and relativistic mechanics. There is no coherent conceptual union between quantum mechanics and relativity. Most of the time, in the systems we can study, both are perfectly applicable. The caveats to that are the very center of a black hole, where things happen and we aren’t quite sure what happens there. In some sense, one practical answer is that we utilize the known laws of physics and that conceptual tensions that do exist between different areas of physics don’t really enter into what most practical physicists do. There are objects, for instance, neutron stars, which are unusual objects. To understand them we need aspects of quantum mechanics, and aspects of Einstein’s theory of general relativity. They’re so small, and their gravity is so strong, that their mechanics can’t be described by newton’s 32 • B erkeley S cientific J ournal • E xtremes • F all 2014 • V olume 19 • I ssue 1