GEK1510/PC1323 Great Ideas in Contemporary Physics

Tutorial 5
1. (a) Suppose that the Mount Everest, which has a mass of about 5 1010 kg, is somehow
compressed into a black hole. How would its Schwarzschild radius be?
(b) The temperature of the Hawking radiation emitted by a black hole of mass M is
approximately given by
(
)
1 kg
T
1023 K
M
How hot will the Mount-Everest black hole be?
(c) If indeed Mount everest suddenly turned into a black hole in its place, consider how it
would affect you in Singapore. E.g., would you be sucked into it? Would you be toasted?

2. Imagine a spherical balloon being inflated, with its radius r depending on time as
r(t) = at ,
where a is a constant. Now suppose there is a colony of ants living on the surface of this
balloon, and that one of them is an exceptionally keen astronomer.
(a) Show that it would be able to deduce an analogue of Hubbles law, at any given instant
in time. [Recall that the ants would measure distances along the surface of the balloon,
not across the interior!]
(b) What is the value of the Hubble constant? Is it really a constant?

3. Three simplest fates of the Universe are open universe, flat universe and closed universe.
Discuss the ultimate fates of the universe in relation to the expansion of the universe and
the mass density of the universe.

4. The earlier form of Einsteins General Relativity field equations contained the cosmological constant, . Why did Einstein feel that this constant was necessary? Was he right or
wrong?

Last updated: March 26, 2015 4:51 pm (CCL)

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Semester II, 2014/15