Laboratory Black Holes: Playing with Temperature express
An ordinary kettle: you heat it up — temperature rises, molecular chaos grows, and steam shoots out. But in the lab, they've created a peculiar "kettle"—an analog black hole made from superconducting circuits cooled to the extreme. The idea of William Unruh allowed them to mimic the key traits of real black holes: trapping waves and the temperature predicted by Hawking.
The main oddity: here, the link between heating and entropy (a measure of disorder) can be severed. In a real black hole, temperature is rigidly tied to mass — the heavier it is, the colder it gets. But in the lab version, you can change it without touching the internal state: as if the kettle heats up, but no steam comes out. The system's behavior splits into two independent halves — thermal and "disorderly."
Yet a surprise: no known model of gravity describes these samples. The scientists took an inverse approach — instead of tweaking theory, they engineered superconducting circuits with desired properties. Thus, the quest for quantum rules for curved spacetime turns into a precise engineering task.
It was Jacob Bekenstein who first suggested that black holes have entropy, linking it to the area of the event horizon.
In the movie "Interstellar," a black hole bends time — analog systems let us see similar effects at the scale of a microchip.