9 papers
Gravity, Entropy, and the Second Law: A Pedagogical Perspective
Jorge Pinochet, Giorgio Sonnino
An interesting question for discussion in university physics courses is whether gravity can conflict with the second law of thermodynamics. In this work, we address this question b…
Entropy, Gravity, and an Apparent Violation of the Second Law
Jorge Pinochet, Giorgio Sonnino
An interesting question to explore in physics classes is whether gravity violates the second law of thermodynamics. Standard physics textbooks provide little to no discussion of th…
Black holes and bits: A simple path to Bekenstein-Hawking entropy
Jorge Pinochet
In the early 1970s, Jacob Bekenstein discovered that black holes have entropy, which became one of the greatest scientific revolutions of the second half of the 20th century. The o…
Hawking in a thousand words
Jorge Pinochet
British physicist Stephen Hawkings most important discovery was that black holes are not so black, as they possess a temperature and emit thermal radiation. In his popular science…
Rotating black holes: The most fantastic source of energy in the universe
Jorge Pinochet
Rotating black holes are the most powerful source of energy in the known universe, and are the cause of some of the most spectacular and extreme astronomical phenomena. The goal of…
Hawking for beginners
Jorge Pinochet
Stephen Hawkings most important scientific contribution was his theoretical discovery that black holes aint so black, since they emit thermal radiation as if they were hot bodies w…
Advanced physics transposition (APT): A new name for a not-so-new field of research
Jorge Pinochet
Research into educational physics is a field of study that has undergone sustained growth in recent decades. Among the topics addressed in educational physics, there is a relativel…
Illuminating dark matter I: A guide for physics teachers
Jorge Pinochet
One of the great mysteries of contemporary science is dark matter, an exotic substance of unknown nature that, in theory, makes up about 27\% of the total mass-energy density of th…
Exploring black holes
Jorge Pinochet
The objective of this work is to present a non-technical introduction to black hole physics. The main properties of the four types of black hole allowed by the no-hair theorem are…