The Unruh Effect

Worried about black holes? Consider this: Every time you accelerate - you generate an event horizon behind you. The more you accelerate away from it the closer it gets. Don’t worry, it can never catch up to you, but the Unruh radiation it generates sure can. Get your own Space Time t­-shirt at Tweet at us! @pbsspacetime Email us! pbsspacetime [at] gmail [dot] com Comment on Reddit: Help translate our videos! Previous Episode: The Andromeda-Milky Way Collision Around the same time that Stephen Hawking was demonstrating the existence of the black hole radiation that would bear his name, three other researchers, Stephen Fulling, Paul Davis, and William Unruh, were looking at an effect that now seems eerily similar. They were independently studying how the nature of quantum fields appears to change depending on whether or not an observer is accelerating. They found that simple act of acceleration cuts off your causal access to a region of the universe. It creates a type of event horizon. As we saw in our episode on horizon radiation, the presence of horizons distorts the quantum vacuum in a way that can create particles. Hosted by Matt O'Dowd Written by Graeme Gossel and Matt O'Dowd Produced by Rusty Ward Graphics by Grayson Blackmon Assistant Editing and Sound Design by Mike Petrow and Linda Huang Made by Kornhaber Brown (www.kornhaberbrown.com) Classical analogue of the Unruh effect Leonhardt, Griniasty, Wildeman, Fort, & Fink Big Bang CoolAsCats David Nicklas Faisal Saud Anton Lifshits Joey Redner Quasar Tambe Barsbay Mayank M. Mehrota Mars Yentur Mark Rosenthal Dean Fuqua Roman Pinchuk ColeslawPurdie Hypernova Edmund Fokschaner Matthew O’Connor Eugene Lawson Barry Hatfield Martha Hunt Joseph Salomone Chuck Zegar Jordan Young Ratfeast John Hofmann Craig Peterson James Hughes Fabian Olesen Kris Fernet Jane Meyers James Flowers Greg Allen TJMadison Denys Ivanov Nick Virtue Alexey Eromenko Nicholas Rose Scott Gossett Mark Vasile Patrick Murray Sultan Alkhulaifi Alex Seto Michal-Peanut Karmi Erik Stein Kevin Warne JJ Bagnell J Rejc Avi Goldfinger John Pettit Florian Stinglmayr Benoit Pagé-Guitard Nathan Leniz Brandon Labonte David Crane Greg Weiss