Laboratory Black Holes: Playing with Temperature ⚡ экспресс
Scientists are building miniature black hole models in electrical circuits to study their properties without actual space travel. Turns out, these 'toy' holes don't fit any known gravity theory, but there's a way to flip the challenge: first find the right theory, then build an experiment to match. Which will come first: the perfect model or the perfect black hole?
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 [scientist:Jacob Bekenstein]Jacob Bekenstein[/scientist] 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.