Episode #188 – The Exhaust Principle

About this episode

This episode discusses the Exhaust Principle and the relationship between black holes and entropy.

In 1973, Jacob Bekenstein, then John Wheeler’s graduate student at Princeton, demonstrated that a black hole’s entropy is proportional to its surface area, a formula that Stephen Hawking and Brandon Carter would later confirm despite setting out to disprove it. The result has been treated as a paradox for fifty years. This episode argues that the paradox dissolves when the second law is read correctly, and the framework that emerges is the Exhaust Principle: entropy is the receipt for every act of building since Genesis, and the black hole is the biggest engine physics permits. Episode Summary John Wheeler, in a filmed interview discussing his work on A Journey into Gravity and Spacetime, once told a story about a conversation with his graduate student Jacob Bekenstein. Wheeler had been thinking about the second law of thermodynamics. He remarked that if he placed a hot tea cup next to a cold tea cup, the two would come to a common temperature, and the universe’s entropy would have gone up because of him. The second law made him complicit. He proposed a solution to his student: if he dropped both cups into a black hole, he could conceal the evidence of the…

People in this episode

Host: Anon

Topics covered

• black holes
• entropy
• thermodynamics
• Exhaust Principle
• physics
• paradox

Keywords

• black hole
• entropy
• second law of thermodynamics
• Exhaust Principle
• Jacob Bekenstein

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