Learning Skills: Are Black Holes Simple?

https://www.inverse.com/article/44878-black-holes-astrophysicist

What is at the center of a black hole? Don’t ask me; I have no idea. Kids ask a lot of questions, not all as difficult as this one, but every parent fears not knowing the answer, to have to admit. “I don’t know.”

Let me set your mind at ease. It’s not the end of your world if you kid discovers you don’t know the answer for everything. It’s better than faking it. When your kid finds out the next day at school that you didn’t know what you were talking about, you’ll never hear the end of it. So go ahead. Say, I don’t know the answer and give them something they can use: learning skills.

So, there you and your kid go, off to the library or an encyclopedia, or the Internet to find the answer, an awesome learning experience for the both of you. Well, maybe. I still couldn’t answer the black hole question. The concept is too big, too layered and I’ve never even dabbled in astrophysics. I would need to break it down into its simplest form to explain it to someone else, a learning skill everyone should have.

The Art of Keeping it Simple

There’s more of an art to “making is simple” than meets the eye. And, being able to do so is a good skill to have if you’re a parent, or a student. After all, knowledge is great on its own, but you really have to know how to express it to others before it does any good.

In this video, “What’s at the Center of a Black Hole?” the narrator explains in simple language with animated visuals, well, what is at the center of the black hole.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_massive_black_holes

Khan Academy is another. The tutorials on that website are amazingly clear and concise. You can watch one and not feel like your head is going to explode. These are great resources for understanding concepts.

If you are trying to explain something to a kid, it’s more important that you model a process, not deliver a you-tube-able answer like the black hole video. If the two of you discover the question involves layer upon layer of prerequisite nuggets of concepts before finding the answer, you can just say, “Wow, your questions has a really complicated answer.” You can get them pointed in the right direction and give them a little shove. It’s okay if they have to work a little to get their own answer.

For older students, learning to express complex concepts clearly is happens in language arts classes. The good old five-paragraph essay. Remember that? An opening paragraph with a statement, three paragraphs supporting your statement, and a last paragraph that sums it all up.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/mathematicians-disprove-conjecture-made-to-save-black-holes-20180517/

So, when their teacher asks them to write a paper on black holes, your teenager is facing much the same problem as you did they asked the same question they asked of you when they were younger. As a matter of fact, expressing complex material clearly and using complex material to answer questions is kind of the point of becoming an educated person. If you know how to do this, the other stuff plugs in to the power source and processed by your awesomely-primed brain.

Armature

One way to attack the problem is to first understand what I call the armature. An armature is like a skeleton, or a frame. You have to flesh that skeleton out, but the underlying structure determines what it’s going to look like when it is.

For the black hole questions the armature is astrophysics, Unless you are an astrophysicist, most of us need to break it down a little more. The “physics” part of astrophysics is about how stuff moves and what happens when it does. The “astro-” part of astrophysics is the same as physics, only the stuff astrophysicists think about are astronomical objects. Break it down a little more. Physics is a branch of science. and science is about finding out answers to things we don’t understand by making educated guesses and then figuring out how to test your guess to see if it is true. (Yes, that’s highly simplified, but that is the point.)

So, without knowing one dot about black holes, here’s what you can present to your kid:

That’s a good question. I don’t know much about black holes, but I know it’s the kind of question astrophysicists think about. ”Physics” is about how stuff moves around, and “astro” means outer space. Scientists asks lots of questions. That’s what scientists do. They ask questions, think up possible answers to the question and then figure out how to test their guesses to see if they are true. Most of the time, they don’t get it right on the first guess, they have to try again. In science, getting it wrong isn’t a failure, it’s just part of the process of figuring stuff out. So, what do you think is at the center of a black hole?

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/16/science/black-hole-questions-answers.html