Prof Hawking cracks riddle of black holes – which may be portals to other universes Professor Stephen Hawking thinks he has solved the 40-year-old information paradox – a conundrum of what happens to matter in black holes. Matter that gets sucked into a black hole was thought to be destroyed by the immense forces involved, as per the theory of general relativity. However, that's a problem from a quantum …
"I claim he is now where I was 20 years ago," 't Hooft told the Wall Street Journal today. "If he announces this as a new idea, I won't be thrilled."
Citation needed.
G'tH and SH have been all over the scene for decades but for one to declare that he thought of something (important enough to generate a faintly "sour grapes" quote) first there has to be some form of publishing involved. If not then tough.
If this is important enough then s/he who publishes first gets to claim willy waving rights.
"The requirement that physical phenomena associated with gravitational collapse should be duly reconciled with the postulates of quantum mechanics implies that at a Planckian scale our world is not 3+1 dimensional. Rather, the observable degrees of freedom can best be described as if they were Boolean variables defined on a two-dimensional lattice, evolving with time. This observation, deduced from not much more than unitarity, entropy and counting arguments, implies severe restrictions on possible models of quantum gravity. Using cellular automata as an example it is argued that this dimensional reduction implies more constraints than the freedom we have in constructing models. This is the main reason why so-far no completely consistent mathematical models of quantum black holes have been found. "
To be fair I wouldn't understand the math but I do understand the abstract.
"aka. the holographic principle."
Thats not the same as saying that information is stored in 2D form in an event horizon of a black hole.
Anyway, the holographic principle is cobblers. If the universe is a 3D "projection" of a 2D space, whats it projecting onto? A giant screen that we're all watching? Plus it hardly squares with string theories suggestion of 11 or more dimensions.
You are not putting things too well, but agreed that all convincing theory makes the case of a fading 2D projection on the spherical (sure, we hear theory of other shapes, up to cylindrical, none convincing except for slight deformations from the sphere) event horizon.
This 'holographic 3D' idea sounds so silly. Still, must be reading about it in more detail, but it seems there is no detail, just a claim.
Some of Ben Gregford's many silly books have people wandering about in the centre of the galaxy, in a massive retreat from machines. They enter a black hole. Gregford was a physicist, but creates a nonsensical scenario, a very few interesting scenes, mainly southern states of the USA inside the black hole.
AFAIK, Gregford does nothing much in physics, not much good as a writer, must be well-connected.-
The one I read, I will not read again, Wilde commented that a book that is really worth reading is worth reading again, Ben Gregford fails that test.
Yes but string theories are just elaborate variations on least energy style equation fitting. What kind of theory would you like today? Just vary your parameters a bit and make up a new one.
I think "string theory" was created to maintain a serviceable population of mathematicians and physicists after the cold ended and the need for new doomsday weapons decreased. They started working on solving underdetermined mathematical models - and we all know there are infinite solutions to those.
The string theory work will literally never end.
You will find that 't Hooft has published quite a few things. That guy cleans up. (examples, and, you know...)
Also: Prof Hawking's view carries a lot of weight in the scientific community.. Not to diss Hawking, but that would be the "popular scientific" community mainly.
"Citation needed"
I'm afraid I don't have one of those, all I can bring is my (honest) initial reaction at reading the "new" theory - "wtf, I heard of this same idea years ago?!?". Unless there are some significant new insights lost somewhere in the details I freely admit failing to grok, the basic idea seems indeed to be long known...
"If this is important enough then s/he who publishes first gets to claim willy waving rights."
It's not important, it's string theory, which some people confuse with physics. But it isn't physics, it's a failed research program culminating in the "multiverse" - a device to explain away the failure of the research program that spawned it. It represents a vast waste of intellectual and scientific energy.
Yup Hawking now has turned around, and finally agrees with Susskind and 't Hooft.
So I have no idea what riddle he cracked.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KR3Msi1YeXQ The Black Hole Wars: My Battle with Stephen Hawking (Leonard Susskind 2008)
A Thin Sheet of Reality: The Universe as a Hologram ( Susskind, 't Hooft and others 2011) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsbZT9bJ1s4
Judging by this story, nothing has changed in the wacky world of relativistic quantum physics.
I thought that such outcomes were excluded...
First of all they give names to things we don't understand to give the illusion of understanding and then invent stuff to explain problems with their theories.
That's not to say they're always wrong, just that it seems to me that there's less knowledge and more guessing than the common man is led to believe.
Susskind addressed your issue when he said string theory describes an infinite number of universes - by some metric (he did not explain which one) you get local minima in the space of solutions, he says each minima is a universe. This is a great explanation of string theory because it both demonstrates humans giving names to things they don't understand and also why string theory is useful.
Oh wait...
Absolutely! Socks (along with buttons) definitely go to an after-life in another universe after being washed but sometimes re-emerge through a time warp or portal several weeks (if not months) later from the time machine that is masquerading as a dryer. Haven't worked out the controls for the replicator section yet though, to give me replacement left or right socks in the same colour. They never come back as a pair, so one must go to a different universe.
"They never come back as a pair, so one must go to a different universe."
No, no, no, no, no.
It is my firm that belief that it is the common House Hippo that is responsible for lost socks. Obviously, the last portion of this documentary was added by the government to throw the general population off.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TijcoS8qHIE
"They never come back as a pair, so one must go to a different universe."
That's inherent to the phenomenon- the socks always appear out of nowhere as a pair, just outside the drier, but the other one gets sucked back in.
The bad news is that this means your drier will eventually disappear. It's unclear if the gradual loss of mass due to this quantum-related sock phenomenon is the reason your drier stops working after a few years, or whether that's due to it being a cheaply-made piece of disposable junk the manufacturers want you to keep replacing.
There must be an element of quantum entanglement too. Haven't you noticed that if you lose something, say a camera, the only way to find it is to buy a new one? Within a day of giving up and buying a new one the old one is found.
Therefore the two object must be entangled somehow.
Biros find their way through wormholes in space to a planet ....
No they don't. They find their way into my wife's car, judging by the vast amount that I regularly find there and throw away. Any commentards desirous of a large and regularly renewed stash of unfeasibly cheap, partly chewed biros should apply to Ledswinger Towers, bringing their own skip.
@wzrd1 - not quite. If you're outside the black hole watching something fall into it, the thing you're watching will certainly appear to become 'frozen in time' to you at some point (assuming you can see it at all), but inside the even horizon time carries on as normal - just not on the same axis that you're used to experiencing time on.
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Or a black hole could be the equivalent of a logic gate for light. All you need is a laser to interfere with the light being emitted from the poles of the black hole to read the result. Of course you don't know what the input was because it came from another universe so we're back to Deep Thought and 42 and the possibility that the universe itself is just a quantum computer where we are the substrate and the black holes are the deterministic qubit gates.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/08/150824114255.htm
Shine on, you crazy diamond.
Which, interestingly, is what a star which isn't massive enough to collapse into a neutron star or a black hole becomes: a white dwarf, the solar core of fusion-produced carbon (or possibly carbon-nitrogen-oxygen) radiating at 10 million degrees for tens of billions of years.
Lovely.
Recently there was an article where a black hole was photographed spewing plasma at high speed out of its core. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-32915126)
I didn't understand how, with a gravity field able to hoover up light and compress matter to a near singularity it could spew out plasma which could then escape the boundary of the event horizon.
I think scientific theory has a long way to go on the black hole subject.
Tom 7,
Penrose spoke of many of the concepts Hawking has recently recycled.
You might enlighten readers more shallow in history by explaining 'misinterpretation of Finklestein'.
This is a tech site, not speculative physics, though as you would guess, many have studied physics to various levels at universities that actually teach it, and theory of electronics and electrical engineering, especially for those graduating before computer-aided everything, is impossible without physics.
As matter gets sucked in towards the collapsar, it gets compressed, which raises its temperature greatly, causing it to at least try to expand. That close to the event horizon, there's only a very narrow angle of sky into which anything can still escape. Any stuff heading toward anywhere else in the sky finds that its trajectory still intercepts the event horizon and thus still gets sucked in. Hence the narrowness of the jets caused.
That doesn't make sense. If it is getting pulled in and compressed then that wouldn't naturally allow it to contain enough energy to expand away.
It could be a case that the compression creates a fusion reaction resulting in a runaway reaction, however this still wouldn't really explain the dynamics of the near speed of light pulses that are emitted.
I'm guessing that no-one really knows.
Don't ever forget that the area just outside the event horizon is still subject to the normal laws of physics.. This means there's a very rapidly spinning ring of very hot plasma right outside that black hole, making for a pretty substantial magnetic field around it. Plasma that enters that bit at the right trajectory will get an almighty whallop and gets shot out at the poles at rather impressive speeds. Same happens at neutron stars, really. the black hole event horizon simply has a higher energy density, so it shoots out stuff even faster.
All the matter and energy falling down the gravitational well is converting potential energy to kinetic energy and heat - that's where the energy comes from. Outside the event horizon, heat and radiation pressure can exceed the gravitation pull. Some of the matter gets hot enough and escapes, and it is very very energetic. Some of the matter gets sucked in. It's only at the event horizon that no escape is possible.
"I didn't understand how, with a gravity field able to hoover up light and compress matter to a near singularity it could spew out plasma which could then escape the boundary of the event horizon."
The same reason a dyson doesn't have much dust going through the motor.
The "cyclone effect" flings most of the matter outwards. Only 2-3% of what's in the accretion sidk is destined to cross the event horizon.
Black holes are messier eaters than Cookie Monster.
"Don't publish the announcement."
So does that mean it's both true and not-true in a quantum superposition and we won't find out till we read the paper, at which point we destroy what we're observing? Or have I got the wrong end of the stick? Does it even have two ends?
Sir, I have no idea what you just said but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
Also, is it just me or does anyone else think that if we could manipulate/decipher Hawking radiation then artificial blackholes could be the ultimate data storage solution? It would give the term 'Hyperconvergence' a literal meaning!
One of the late great Jack Williamson's later great short stories had trust in Hawking radiation going wrong as a central plot point.
Someone makes a mini-black hole in containment, it falls out, gains mass ...
Doesn't evaporate.
I cannot recall the title, still have it, but it is in a box right now.
On the concrete level, I cannot imagine the conditions for mini black holes that evaporate through Hawking radiation to form.
It's called theory. The same as the theory that nothing can go faster than the speed of light. It creates a basic component of physics, however new theories may come along which supersede those of before.
For a lot of physics "a theory" and a "supposed to" is about as close as you can get.
I may be old-fashioned here but in my book a theory is a hypothesis that has been tested by some means which would be able to falsify it and has so far failed to be falsified. A hypothesis is a proposition that is testable in that way even if it hasn't been so tested. "Supposed to" is a long way from either.
"For a lot of physics "a theory" and a "supposed to" is about as close as you can get."
The problems arise when further theories use these suppositions as facts and build on them. It wouldn't surprise if a large part of modern theoretical physics is a house of cards just waiting for someone to whip out one of the cards/suppositions at the bottom.
IIRC Hawking Radiation is justified by an application of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle to 'objects' at the Event Horizon of a Black Hole (i.e. since you can't predict that everything is going in then some things must be coming out).
I was never convinced by this and offer up an alternative definition for an event horizon:
The set of points at which HUP ceases to work in the vicinity of a Black Hole.
"It wouldn't surprise if a large part of modern theoretical physics is a house of cards just waiting for someone to whip out one of the cards/suppositions at the bottom."
It is closer to underpinning a foundation than removing one, it allows you to build a new and stronger structure. Physicists are not a priesthood trying to preserve the status quo they are actively trying to rip it down and re-build it.
Surely we just send BT's crack customer service commando unit. The black hole will give up all its information in self defence, after the 3 millionth iteration of Greensleaves and attempt to get through to the right department.
I know that confession under torture is inadmissible in court. But is it acceptable for scientific papers?
I've got copies of all the Firefly box-sets. Only mine are from the alternate universe where it was written and produced by David Hasselhoff. Did I mention that he also starred as Captain Mal Reynolds?
Would you like me to post them to you? You can have them for free...
I'll say it again.... Black holes take an infinite amount of time to form since an increase in gravity slows down time. Therefore, black holes proper (a singularity) do not exist in our universe and all these wacky conjectures about how to deal with a singularity are unnecessary. "The laws of physics break down inside a black hole" the same way they do in fairy land and for the same reasons. It's sad that Mr Hawking has wasted his whole life on this and is clawing at something that people will believe before he dies. I know I sound heartless but how much money have we wasted on this stuff? As Alders razor states - anything that cannot be proven by experiment is not even worthy of discussion, and therefore our funding ir attention.
"Therefore, black holes proper (a singularity) do not exist in our universe"
At least one theory has been advanced that they're the last stage of implosion before it bounces back out, with the extreme gravity slowing this sub-femtosecond event down enough that the rest of the universe sees it as a long-lived process.
The problem with them is that all conventional physics breaks at the event horizon. They exist, but we can't really explain how and having one close enough to experiment on isn't conducive to being able to write up the results
Perhaps 30 years ago, I read in a book by Freeman Dyson the theory that the other side of a black hole is a white hole, spewing matter and/or energy into another location, perhaps another universe. It has been posited that in another universe, the big bang would appear to be a white hole.
"The concept of a “white hole,” a hypothetical object emerging spontaneously from a singularity – or a time-reversed version of a black hole – was introduced by Igor Novikov in 1964, but without referring to it as a white hole. The following year the concept was independently considered by Yuval Ne’eman, who called the object a “lagging core.” The apt name “white hole,” which may first have been used in 1971, soon became popular while “lagging core” was forgotten. Contrary to the black holes, white holes or lagging cores are not believed to exist in nature. They were sometimes called “little bangs,” a term also used with somewhat different connotations (Hoyle 1965; Harrison 1968).'
—http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1301/1301.0219.pdf
a particle is an expression of energy bound by certain rules and parameters. Those rules and parameters take the form of information, therefore particles=information.
I would like someone to provide me with the probability of a bacon-sandwich suddenly appearing before me so I can input it in to my Bambleweeny 57....thanks.
They would like to prohibit dissenting views, on pain of persecution and preferably prosecution, maybe a little gratuitous torture if they were really able to express the desires of their lovingly self-righteous and totalitarian-flavoured hearts.
Most despise science and have never studied it. Doesn't stop them appealing to 'the science' in their little neo-Jacobin campaign.
Personally, I have no doubt that ripping every last accessible hydrocarbon deposit from the Earth will have disastrous consequences in tandem with the collapse that is inevitable as a result of runaway population growth.
Having respect for and having studied actual science, I know that nobody has an exact enough science of climate to predict where it will go, except that megacities make horrid heat islands.
Even there, Japan, including our heat-island capital, Tokyo, has been in the midst of very cool temperatures for August over about ten days, the maximum today was 22 celcius. Forecasts are for it to continue, not so low, but not typical high summer.
I hate the many recent summers extending into late September, or even October in some years, but am really disturbed by such cool weather in late August.
My own opinion is instability.
But isn't the principle of the flux capacitor that it reduces the speed necessary to generate a metastable wormhole with a diameter of just under 14 feet (see the technical schematics for the Delorean) from 57% of the speed of light to 88mph and hold it open long enough for the vehicle to make it through in one piece minus the number plate.
Also this incurs a power usage penalty which is a constant in Dr. E. Brown's field equations of 1.21GW, just under 0.5kg 239Pu or about 0.00000000018% of a ZPM at full charge.
When the vehicle emerges from hyperspace at the same relative velocity and location but on a different parallel Earth, obviously the energy loss will cause a corresponding decrease in external temperature as is observed.
In fact the energy loss/gain on each side equals out so E=MC2 would apply causing a big flash of light (tm) at the entry and exit points and probably a fair amount of wideband RF noise.
More details soon...
Why isn't the black hole and what surrounds the black hole composed of or directed by "information?"
Then the black hole is tolerant of some information. I would rather ask Who instead of How such information originated. Something or Someone informed the black hole to discriminate as to what it can associate or not associate with. Hawking is not the answer as to who. At least, the black hole has been formed/imagined by the data in Hawking's and others' minds.
Zeno was right.
"The information is not stored in the interior of the black hole as one might expect, but in its boundary – the event horizon," Prof Hawking said. "The idea is the super translations are a hologram of the ingoing particles, thus they contain all the information that would otherwise be lost."
See - It never gets all the way there. Half-measures and all that.
Relative to the external universe, anything below the event horizon is frozen in time just below the event horizon or wherever else matter within the collapse was when singularity moved the event horizon out past it.
So, in theory, most matter "eaten" by the black hole is just below the event horizon.
Information is captured, held, then apparently streamed back... eventually...
So if a rotating black hole of proper characteristics could possibly be a gateway to another universe, from what type of stellar object does the captured material emerge? Are we actually seeing emergence of matter/energy from other universes into ours and just haven't recognized it as such yet?
@Unicompiss - so far as I can make out, anything falling into a black hole ends up inside a unique new 'universe' (ie, 'white hole' = 'big bang') . And, if I understand correctly (hey, I'm no genius, I may be wrong), when they fall into the hole in our universe doesn't matter; two things falling into a black hole a billion years apart as seen from out universe would still exit the big bang at t'other side at the same instant. Whilst the spatial dimensions do some peculiar things as one approaches and goes 'through' a singularity, what happens to time is even more peculiar, and I can't even begin to think about what happens to the other 6 or 7 dimensions I gather are thought to exist acording to current theories, as I frankly don;t understand them. Just messing with the usual 4 is about as much as I can handle. :-}
Perhaps 30 years ago, I read in a book by Freeman Dyson the theory that the other side of a black hole is a white hole, spewing matter and/or energy into another location, perhaps another universe. It has been posited that in another universe, the big bang would appear to be a white hole.
"The concept of a “white hole,” a hypothetical object emerging spontaneously from a singularity – or a time-reversed version of a black hole – was introduced by Igor Novikov in 1964, but without referring to it as a white hole. The following year the concept was independently considered by Yuval Ne’eman, who called the object a “lagging core.” The apt name “white hole,” which may first have been used in 1971, soon became popular while “lagging core” was forgotten. Contrary to the black holes, white holes or lagging cores are not believed to exist in nature. They were sometimes called “little bangs,” a term also used with somewhat different connotations (Hoyle 1965; Harrison 1968).'
—http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1301/1301.0219.pdf
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