Black hole, as an inevitable solution of Einstein’s General Relativity, has been known and studied for nearly a century within a limited community of experts. In the aftermath of LIGO’s 2016 discovery of gravitational waves induced by the merger of binary black holes, and with a series of Nobel prizes that recognize black hole related contributions, black holes have finally become a hot research topic. It is therefore timely to offer a course that introduces to students the basic knowledge of black holes as well as the related unresolved problems.
The recent exciting breakthroughs a la LIGO et al., nevertheless, are all within the domain of classical black holes. Hawking’s seminal discovery of the black hole evaporation connects General Relativity with quantum field theory. The possibility that Hawking evaporation may result in the loss of information has serious implications in theoretical physics, and this ‘information loss paradox’ has been plaguing the physics community for more than 40 years, yet the final resolution is still lacking. As an extreme form of matter, black holes are an ideal testbed for the development of quantum theory of gravity, which is arguably the final frontier of physics.