The Importance of Entropy in Energy Extraction

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In the famous textbook by Kip Thorne and also Mizner and Wheeler, there's this picture of an advanced civilization that has built an energy extraction device around the supermassive black hole. There's a lot of energy we could in principle look it out. From our dependence on foreign oil sources, if we could really harness black holes this way. But when it came to the talk, I can't see which way around was it.

Sir Roger Penrose has had a remarkable life. He has contributed an enormous amount to our understanding of general relativity, perhaps more than anyone since Einstein himself -- Penrose diagrams, singularity theorems, the Penrose process, cosmic censorship, and the list goes on. He has made important contributions to mathematics, including such fun ideas as the Penrose triangle and aperiodic tilings. He has also made bold conjectures in the notoriously contentious areas of quantum mechanics and the study of consciousness. In his spare time he's managed to become an extremely successful author, writing such books as The Emperor's New Mind and The Road to Reality. With far too much that we could have talked about, we decided to concentrate in this discussion on spacetime, black holes, and cosmology, but we made sure to reserve some time to dig into quantum mechanics and the brain by the end. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.