Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe

Listener Questions #28

13 snips
Jan 27, 2026
Listeners hear lively Q and A about how concentrated photon energy can in principle make tiny black holes and why that is unlikely. They explore what might lie beyond an event horizon and how primordial black holes could form. The pair also dive into why many organs come in twos while others stay single, and whether bubble universes could collide or leave detectable traces.
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ADVICE

Don't Fear Lab-Made Photon Black Holes

  • You don't need to worry about man-made lasers creating black holes today because required energy densities are astronomically huge.
  • Creating a black hole from light would need more energy than the Sun emits in a second concentrated into a femtometer-scale region.
INSIGHT

Black Holes Lose Their Original Identity

  • A black hole's external properties (mass, charge, spin) hide the original material inside.
  • General relativity predicts a singularity but quantum mechanics likely alters that unknown interior.
ANECDOTE

Early-Universe Photon Black Hole Possibility

  • Primordial black holes could have formed when the early universe was radiation dominated and energy density fluctuations were high.
  • Those black holes might be made mostly of photons if pockets of light were dense enough then.
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