This book is a Weekend Pocketbook on Everything You Should Know About How to Destroy a Black Hole, the story of whether the universe's most extreme objects can ever truly be destroyed. Written in everyday language, we explore black holes as engines where gravity, time, quantum physics, and the future of the universe collide.
Can anything kill a black hole?
We begin with the beasts themselves: primordial black holes, stellar-mass black holes, intermediate-mass black holes, supermassive giants like Sagittarius A*, and ultramassive monsters such as TON 618. We explore event horizons, spaghettification, gravitational waves, relativistic jets, and whether attacks like nukes, antimatter, or brute-force machines would work,
We then turn to more imaginative ways to destroy a black hole, starting with Hawking radiation. Why does quantum theory suggest that black holes are not perfectly eternal?
We explore more violent possibilities, such as Phantom energy and a gravitational "black hole bomb". Nature seems to protect the horizon with radiation, pair production, magnetic drag, and self-correction. Can we find a way to pierce through that armor?
