Summary
"What's inside a black hole and could we fly a spaceship inside?" asks Jorge Luis Alvarez from Mexico City.
Some interstellar fieldwork is on the agenda in today's Curious Cases. Astrophysicist Sheila Rowan explains how we know invisible black holes actually exist. And cosmologist Andrew Pontzen is on hand to help cook one up.
But which of our intrepid doctors will volunteer to fly into the heart of a black hole?
You can send your Curious Cases for the team to investigate to: curiouscases@bbc.co.uk
Presenters: Hannah Fry, Adam Rutherford Producer: Michelle Martin.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm Dr Adam Rutherford. And I'm Dr Hannah Fry. And you are going to send us your everyday |
| 0:10.8 | mysteries. And we are going to investigate them using the power of science. Science. |
| 0:16.5 | I like it. Welcome to episode three of the curious cases of Rutherford and Flyer. |
| 0:25.7 | I can't even see my own name. Rutherford and Flyer. And Flyer. Super Flyer. |
| 0:31.4 | The reason why I mucked up that intro is because we are being watched by... |
| 0:38.6 | We are. We are. We have guests in the pod. The wonderful Andrew Ponson. Hello, Andrew. |
| 0:43.7 | Hello. Hello. You're the third time on the curious cases, I think. |
| 0:47.5 | Is it? It's fourth. Fourth. Third. In fact, we did account for this. Not that long ago, |
| 0:53.1 | because the only entity that has been featured more regularly is your dog Molly. Yes, indeed. |
| 0:59.6 | So, why don't you have your dog Molly sitting in this chair then? Because you know |
| 1:05.2 | fractionally more about black holes than Molly. Yeah, she's not a great conversationist of |
| 1:09.2 | you honest. I think you're marginally better. Thank you. I'm going to put that on my CV. |
| 1:14.8 | And the reason Andrew is here today as a cosmology astrophysicist is because our episode is about |
| 1:21.2 | black holes. And this is something that you know a little about Andrew. A little bit. Nobody |
| 1:27.8 | really knows that much about them and that's why they are so fantastic. That's called niche |
| 1:32.0 | construction and evolutionary biology. You pick a subject that no one knows anything about. |
| 1:36.0 | And then just fill it. That's cheating. I think it's actually a scientist. You do something |
| 1:41.4 | that everyone is doing. Now, this is pretty good strategy for science in general. They're |
| 1:45.1 | quite cool, they aren't they? They are very cool. And they're the weirdest effects in physics as well. |
| 1:49.8 | So not only are they not very well understood, but the bits we do understand, |
| 1:53.8 | they just kind of expose all the bizarreest bits of physics that you can think of. And we're going |
| 1:58.6 | to get into that in the program itself. But then also, as has become customary on the curious |
... |
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