Black Holes 'Do Not Exist,' Contends Physicist 759
SpaceAdmiral writes "Nature reports that, according to a physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, 'It's a near certainty that black holes don't exist.' George Chapline argues that the collapse of massive stars is more likely to lead to dark energy stars. These dark energy stars behave somewhat like a black hole outside of the surface, but the negative gravity inside could cause matter to 'bounce back out again.'"
The actual article (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The actual article (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The actual article (Score:3, Informative)
http://xxx.arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0503200/foo.pdf [arxiv.org]
Re:The actual article (Score:3, Insightful)
Event horizons and closed time-like curves cannot exist in the real world for the simple reason that they are inconsistent with quantum mechanics.
And photons do not exist because they contradict the double-slit experiment? Give me a break. It doesn't make sense to proclaim that something does not exist because it contradicts an established theory, especially if there is quite a bit of evidence that it's actually there. It's the other way round: If such a thing exists, the the
Re:The actual article (Score:4, Informative)
All it means... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:The actual article (Score:4, Funny)
The guy's not even crippled!
Re:The actual article (Score:5, Informative)
-Stephen Hawking (a.k.a. Your Crippled Scientist)
Re:The actual article (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The actual article (Score:3, Interesting)
However, his black-hole theories hold up for the most part, still. regardless as how you look at it, no one's actually looked more at black-holes as hawking has for the moment.
It would take more than 4 pages to convince anyone that Hawking's 30 years+ research in that area to be totally wrong.
Re:The actual article (Score:3, Funny)
I just have to ask: If you believe there is no blackhole, does that make you an aholist?
Re:The actual article (Score:5, Informative)
As to best known? Isn't that still open to debate? I may be wrong, but I'm pretty certain that black holes have yet to be observed as such. There is evidence that is best explained by black holes, but, if this theory has any weight, it could be equally valid.
Re:The actual article (Score:5, Informative)
That means that there may well be far far more work on this than four pages, and the conf. paper is a precis. of that work.
Re:The actual article (Score:5, Insightful)
Cygnus XR-1 is a good example of such an object. Do we know for certain that it's a black hole. Well no, we don't. Perhaps there are other classes of objects out there that can produce similar effects, which is what I believe this fellow is saying. Nothing wrong with coming up with alternate solutions. That's what science is all about. There was a time when Hawkings and Penrose were causing stirs in the establishment, and it seems only right that now that they are establishment, that a scientist comes along to challenge them. It's all about the evidence, so we'll see if what this fellow says survives scrutiny.
Re:The actual article (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The actual article (Score:5, Insightful)
What I'd like to see is a physical equation saying that the theoretical predictions on black holes are WRONG.
If he can't prove with equations that Black Holes don't exist, then his theory is flawed. Of course, he could prove that dark energy stars DO exist. But from that to saying that ALL black holes don't...
Re:The actual article (Score:4, Informative)
No, it's not. Re-read my original response.
The noticable effect of light "slowing down" in a medium is due to quanta interacting with matter, not because the quanta actually "slows down." When a photon interacts with an atom it transfers energy (same force) to the electron shell. This causes an atomic state change which can only be sustained for a limited period of time. When the state reverts (and this, of course, depends on the properties of the matter in question) a photon is emitted. With transparent substances, such as water, the wavelength of the "new" photon is substantially similar to the original and "headed" in the same direction as the original photon.
During this brief period, it is accurate to say that the quantum wave function no longer exists as "light" (although the EM force bound to it continues to). Thus the perceived difference between C and C-propagating-through-water is merely the time taken for the medium to interact with the original "light."
Re:The actual article (Score:4, Informative)
Inside a solid/liquid/gas != charge-free space.
Inside the fluid, your Hamiltonian is totally complicated with the electrons and nuclei all running around and interacting with one another; as a result, the eigenstates are incomprehensible.
For materials that are not strongly absorbing, you can see approximate eigenstates, which look very much like free photons, except their dispersion curve reflects a refractive index != 1.
That's about all you can say. Your picture of "photon propagates at c, is absorbed and re-emitted" is a cartoon of the first term of a perturbation series, not a microscopic view of what is really going on. There's a whole lot of averaging and other math that goes between that cartoon and the final result of a calculation.
Re:The actual article (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow, are we applying PHB standards to an already politicized world of science? Are you in the college text business or something? Whatever happened to the most elegant and simplist solution being the likely right explaination?
Re:The actual article (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Conference paper vs. Journal Article (Score:5, Insightful)
Take a look at the header - this was submitted to a conference, *not* a full peer-reviewed journal. Many conferences (I know for sure most IEEE conferences are like this) limit paper submissions to 4 pages. URSI (Union Radio-Scientifique Internationale - they're just like IEEE Antennas and Propigation Society, with mostly the same members and co-host their conference) papers are even limited to 1 page for their conference. *Conference* papers really more discussion points than full blown "proofs". I'd suspect he'd follow this up with an "official" paper in one of their peer-reviewed journals.
Re:Conference paper vs. Journal Article (Score:4, Informative)
Four pages is all it should take to briefly introduce a new theory, which is what George is doing.
p.s. George Chapline is very a bright fella with a history of suggesting contrarian theories. At least one of those theories has led to a entire branch of nuclear physics.
Re:The actual article (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The actual article (Score:3, Insightful)
Sometimes just the opposite. Proving there is intelligence life elsewhere in the universe, takes only one verified example.
OTOH, proving that no other intelligence exists, would involve a very exhaustive process.
Re:The actual article (Score:5, Informative)
Why did he make this up? Because Irving was trying to create in his book an image of Columbus as a modern, scientific man against an image of a faith-believing, unscientific man. So, he looked for conflicts. He found out that the professors of a Spanish university had told the King and Queen to not fund Columbus on scientific grounds. He thought he had the Church right were he wanted them (at the time, almost all professors of Universities were priests), until he read further.
Columbus had 're-calculated' the diameter of the earth, and that's why he thought he could have made it to Asia. The priests argued that his calculations were wrong, and that Columbus would run out of food and water before making it.
In the end, the calculations that the priests had provided were as close as the measuring tools of the time could provide. They were right, Columbus was wrong. If there wasn't a nice little continent in the way, Columbus's party would have either been forced to turn around, or they would have died at sea. However, this story (which showed those nasty priests as being scientifically correct), didn't work for Irving, so he made up a story about the Church teaching that the world was flat.
This story has then been perpetuated as 'fact' ever sense.
Re:The actual article (Score:4, Insightful)
I heard on the radio, a little more than a year ago, that Columbus had used more than half his water before they found North America. He was definitely wrong about the distance he had to cover. Was he a wiley sea captain with knowledge of the Americas (before Vespucci named it after himself), or was he a fool who bet his life and the lives of his crew that he was correct, lost the bet, but then lucked out?
Re:The actual article (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The actual article (Score:5, Funny)
"The earth, she's a round like a orange."
"She's flat like a pancake."
"No, she's round like my head."
*WHAM*
"She's flat like your head."
I wonder that the flat earth people never picked up on the post-hit-with-a-mallet-head shape; it solves the problem of round eclipses, and still gives you a flat edge to fall off of.
-aiabx
Re:The actual article (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The actual article (Score:5, Insightful)
It's fairly incontrovertable that there *are* objects in the universe with gravity so intense that light can't escape them (at least visible light), but as for what actually happens at the 'event' horizon, it's all a guess. Gravastars, Dark Energy stars, and Black Holes all would look about the same in a radio telescope. There's no reason this can't be true.
Besides, uninformed dismissal based on previous works is what put Galileo in the pokey. Proper management of a paper like this would be to determine an experiment and examine the results.
Re:The actual article (Score:5, Funny)
Silly Buttons.
Re:The actual article (Score:4, Interesting)
Let me remind you that Einstein's paper about special relativity took only one (or was it two) pages.
Please don't apply the standards of French sosiology to the physics.
Re:The actual article (Score:3)
Re:The actual article (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, one followed me around and often ate my homework when I was in school.
Dark energy question (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Dark energy question (Score:5, Informative)
Daniel
Yeah maybe... buttt... (Score:5, Funny)
On the other hand though...
Tell someone there are a million stars in the sky and they'll believe you...
Tell them paint is wet and...
Disappointed with Nature (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Disappointed with Nature (Score:5, Informative)
The problem with quantum mechanics and relativity is that the theory of quantum mechanics only works well when gravity is so weak that it can be neglected. Particle theory only works when we pretend gravity doesn't exist. On the other hand, general relativity only works when we pretend that the Universe is purely classical and that quantum mechanics is not needed in our description of nature.
The solution is string theory. This [superstringtheory.com] website has a nice list of expirements that have been done in favor of string theory.
Re:Disappointed with Nature (Score:3, Insightful)
Incidentally, the page you cite contains no references
Re:Disappointed with Nature (Score:3, Informative)
The solution is string theory. This [superstringtheory.com] website has a nice list of expirements that have been done in favor of string theory.
String theory may or may "be the solution". But let's not kid ourselves; there have been *no* experiments done that support string theory. The site linked is just playing "let's pretend".
Oh it's on now (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Oh it's on now (Score:5, Funny)
Duh... he is in a wheelchair dude.
picture (Score:5, Funny)
Apparently they look something like this [humlak.cz]
Good one (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good one (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Good one (Score:5, Funny)
Theory tug of war (Score:5, Interesting)
So what did this dudes? (Score:5, Interesting)
The Monday after daylight savings? (Score:5, Funny)
Personally I buy this better than a black hole (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Personally I buy this better than a black hole (Score:5, Insightful)
What is "true science?". Science is a process, not a result. Things that turned out to be wrong, like phlogiston or ether, aren't necessarily bad science, they are still part of the process.
They were disproved, and lead to better (as in having more accurate predictive power) theories. Black Holes are extrapolations of existing theories that seem good (like General Relativity), so they shouldn't be dismissed unless we can disprove them or come up with a better theory.
That, after all, is science.
Re:Personally I buy this better than a black hole (Score:3, Insightful)
The difference is we have proof the world is not flat. Can you offer proof that relativity is wrong?
Not to disagee that scientists are human, and for all the "if new facts disprove it, the theory will change" some will have a personal investment in old theories and not want to let go.
Still, if someone told me they didn't beleive in relativity I'd be inclinded to dismiss them unless they had something pretty good to back it up. I mean do I beleive Einstien (and all the physics built on his work) or some
Dark energy stars? (Score:5, Interesting)
Over the past few years, observations of the motions of galaxies have shown that some 70% the Universe seems to be composed of a strange 'dark energy' that is driving the Universe's accelerating expansion
Ah, but I at least one theory exists that says dark energy isn't really needed. [slashdot.org]
Not there's anything wrong with having different theories, we'll let observational data sort it out later. Could a physicist around here explain how these proposed dark energy stars could explain the expansion of the universe if they behave exactly like black holes outside the event horizon?
This is likely wrong. (Score:5, Interesting)
Conventional theory doesn't tie dark matter to dark energy at all. If the popularizations hadn't used the word dark in both cases, the two concepts would easily be completely unrelated.
Several candidates for dark matter are very conventional forms of matter, such as neutrinos or even plain old neutronium, which don't need an exotic explanation. Others involve particles we have produced in accelerators or theorize on the basis of data we have obtained ever since the 1940's.
Dark Energy, o.t.o.h., is something very different. The evidence for it is all very recent, and the theories proposed are all well outside the standard model for Cosmology.
Thinking we even need a single theory to explain both only makes sense if you can first disprove the more conventional explanations for dark matter.
I have often wondered... (Score:3, Interesting)
Just a thought...
Re:I have often wondered... (Score:5, Informative)
Wouldn't work. (Score:4, Insightful)
Not likely, and even if so, not for very long. What would hold this enormous amount of like-charged particles together? (Note: the electromagnetic force is way stronger than gravity.) But even if you had the electric equivalent of a black hole, it wouldn't last very long, because it would only attract oppositely charged particles, and they would reduce the net charge on the "hole".
Put another way, charge aggregation is a negative feedback loop, whereas mass aggregation is a positive feedback loop.
Re:I have often wondered... (Score:5, Informative)
That gives a figure for the escape velocity of
v = sqrt(2GM/m(r*r))
However, for a rocket (or other powered device) to escape a planet's gravitational pull, as the GP said, all it has to do is provide enough vertical thrust to provide a positive acceleration. That acceleration does not have to accelerate it to the escape velocity - in fact, you could adjust it to compensate for the falling gravitational pull and so maintain a constant velocity of whatever you want, and (if you have sufficient power/fuel) you'll still escape.
That doesn't work for a black hole because all of that is based on Newtonian mechanics, which do not apply in the large gravitational fields close to the event horizon. There, you must use General Relativity, which is counter to our everyday common sense view of the world (precisely because on our scales, it's irrelevant). I don't know enough about GR to demonstrate why this is, however.
Nitpick: (Score:5, Interesting)
You're partly right. You can NEVER escape a planet's gravitational pull. It just keeps pulling, no matter how far you go.
Escape velocity is the inital speed needed for a ballistic object to ensure that the gravitational pull of the planet will never be able to bring it to a complete stop, relative to the planet. As you move away from the planet, the gravitational force weakens. If you can move away faster than the force can slow you down, then the gravity of the planet can never stop you. That's the escape velocity.
However, for a rocket (or other powered device) to escape a planet's gravitational pull, as the GP said, all it has to do is provide enough vertical thrust to provide a positive acceleration. That acceleration does not have to accelerate it to the escape velocity - in fact, you could adjust it to compensate for the falling gravitational pull and so maintain a constant velocity of whatever you want, and (if you have sufficient power/fuel) you'll still escape.
In theory, you're partly correct here. If you could overcome gravity to provide a 1 foot per second squared upward accelleration, then yeah, you'd get to outer space. Eventually. It'd take one hell of a lot of fuel though, because you're only barely overcoming gravity. It's not actually *possible* because no ship exists that can do that and also have enough fuel to do it.
Any acceleration larger than gravity will get you there eventually if you assume enough fuel. And as gravity drops off due to distance, eventually you'll be travelling faster than escape velocity for the given height you happen to be at. And then you're free.
That doesn't work for a black hole because all of that is based on Newtonian mechanics, which do not apply in the large gravitational fields close to the event horizon. There, you must use General Relativity, which is counter to our everyday common sense view of the world (precisely because on our scales, it's irrelevant). I don't know enough about GR to demonstrate why this is, however.
The main reason is similar to the above: You don't have enough fuel. And not just because the technology doesn't exist, but because inside the event horizon, the acceleration due to gravity is so high that even light itself isn't moving fast enough to go "up". No amount of acceleration will let you make any forward progress at all, because you cannot possibly give it enough speed to exceed the speed of light. So you can't even go up at 1 foot per second, you can only go down.
To put it another way, inside the event horizon, space is bent in such a way that moving away from the singularity is no longer an available option.
Outside the event horizon, the normal, simple, equations still apply, more or less. The gravity is high, but the concept is the same. With a higher gravity comes a higher escape velocity, that's all. Also time dilation, but that's rather irrelevent to this discussion.
Re:I have often wondered... (Score:3, Insightful)
I get an object cannot accelerate past the speed of light. I get an object cannot reach escape velocity for a black hole.
However, my point is you don't need to reach escape velocity to escape from an object's gravity, escape velocity is for unpowered objects, objects exerting their own force don't need to reach escape velocity.
The fact it is under it's own power is entirely relevant, becuase if it is escape velocity doesn't apply, escape velocity applies when the only factors are the object escaping's s
Re:I have often wondered... (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm sure someone who's actually had a relativity class can explain it better than I can, but I think I'm on the right track at least.
Re:I have often wondered... (Score:5, Informative)
Plus, say you can create a strong enough magnetic field. What are you going to push/pull against? Some star out in the middle of nowhere? It probably doesn't have a strong enough magnetic field of its own? The black hole itself? Now you're getting into all kinds of other problems.
One final thing to note about your idea - gravity affects electromagnetic radiation, and hence it's affecting magnetic fields. Ever heard of gravitational lensing? Ever heard the statement that the event horizon is the point after which "even light can't excape"? It's not as simple as trying to create a bigger force, as the gravity of the black hole itself would be distorting the magnetic field you are trying to create.
What next? (Score:5, Funny)
This is why I make it a point to never listen to scientists. They change their minds too often. You'd think women would dominate science, considering their natural talents in that area.
Electron-Position anihilation (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Electron-Position anihilation (Score:3, Informative)
But couldn't that distribution be due to secondary radiation from gas heated to plasma by the radiation from the +/- anihilation? There's a lot of gas between here and the galactic core.
TWW
Re:Electron-Position anihilation (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Electron-Position anihilation (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Electron-Position anihilation (Score:3, Informative)
Trust me guys -- if it were this trivially tossed aside, it never would have even made it into the proceedings. (In fact, I dare say, George would have never suggested it. I've worked with him briefly -- and, trust me, this is not an amature.)
AARGH! Phonetic word nazi alert! (Score:4, Informative)
One thing that is wrong with black holes vis a vie quantum mechanics...
Such a silly mistake from a Real Scientist(tm). Vis-a-vis, perhaps?
Tiller's Rule: NEVER use a word that you've only heard and never read. You WILL look like a fool.
so how does he get a horizon? (Score:3, Interesting)
A Revolution is Needed (Score:5, Insightful)
Black holes (Score:3, Funny)
what does Hawking say about this? (Score:3, Interesting)
Negative gravity (Score:3, Interesting)
That is, if this theory is true.
What it all means (Score:4, Insightful)
This isn't very satisfactory, and we've known for a long time that something interesting must happen to smooth out these infinities at the Planck scale (something to the tune of 10^-33 cm). In this limited sense, we've known all along that "strict" black holes don't exist: that is, the pure, mathematical singularities that GR predicts must be smoothed out by quantum effects at very short scales.
In keeping with the sloppy thinking that makes physics the Queen of the Sciences (IAAP, as it happens) we've decided that those Planck-scale effects don't really count, and implicitly modified our concept of "Black Hole" to accomodate them.
What this guy is playing with is the idea that something interesting happens on much larger scales. In this case, although there is still something like an event horizon, it is no longer a singularity in the space-time co-ordinates of distant observers, but rather a phase transition in the quantum-mechanical vaccuum. He is proposing a macroscopic quantum mechanism for smoothing out the singularity.
This is a nice move for two reasons: the study of quantum critical behavior has a variety of analogues such as superfluids that can be studied in the lab; and there are physical phenomena that he predicts which may explain a variety of otherwise problematic observations. These are: high-energy positrons from the centre of our galaxy (where there is a 10^6 solar mass dense object); gamma-ray bursts; cosmological dark matter.
Overall, this is a nice, plausible, interesting approach to a serious problem.
--Tom
Re:What it all means (Score:3)
The event horizon is a singularity in the co-ordinate system of distant observers. It is correct to say that Planck-scale effects won't remove the event horizon in the sense that we still won't be able to observe much inside it. But they will remove the singularity of the event horizon, as they will also remove the singularity of the infinite density at the centre (the singularity you say black holes "contain").
I'm using "singularity" in the mathematical sense, not the physical sense, which is reasonable
Re:Paradigm shift (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Paradigm shift (Score:3, Funny)
Re:lol (Score:5, Funny)
Oh yeah? Proof by contradiction; you.
Re:lol (Score:3, Funny)
Would this be a situation where one can link to goatex and have it actually be Informative?
Re:I don't Believe it! (Score:5, Funny)
You mean they told you that they loved you, but it turned out they were just using you for sex?
Re:I don't Believe it! (Score:5, Funny)
Kirk and Spock Used Me (Score:5, Funny)
More or less. I guess I should have figured it out for myself
-- Kirk kept shouting, "Oh Janice, oh Janice!"
-- Spock only did it every seven years.
-kgj
Gravity does not exist! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:I don't Believe it! (Score:5, Informative)
Warping away from the black hole caused the Enterprise to pass beyond Warp 10, which evidently caused it to go back in time (though passing Warp 10 sometimes doesn't). They wind up on earth in the 1960's and have some dealings with the USAF.
I don't think it was the fist time they did the time warp, there was also an early episode where it occured because the had to "hard start" the warp drive.
Re:I don't Believe it! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Did anybody say crackpottery? (Score:5, Insightful)
Right now, black holes are what seem to fit observations and theory. If we get more data (perhaps what this article is referring to) that does not conform, then the theory will change with it.
Thats not crackpottery, thats the way its supposed to work. There is no such thing as a 'final' theory. Its a process.
Re:Did anybody say crackpottery? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Did anybody say crackpottery? (Score:5, Insightful)
Geez, just because you don't understand it doesn't make it wrong. Weirder stuff has already been proven.
Re:Did anybody say crackpottery? (Score:5, Informative)
You seem to be a very skeptical person, or perhaps you have not looked very far, In 1971, experiments were carried out using four caesium beam atomic clocks (The Hafele-Keating Experiment). Two of the atomic clocks were put on commercial jets and flown in opposite directions around the world. The predicted time dilation matched up to the difference in the atomic clocks.
I find it rather unlikely that this is a coincidence. What are the chances that two pairs of atomic clocks would fail, and fail by exactly the same amount as theory predicts. Pretty slim.
Of course, this was an experiment done on the macroscopic scale. In particle accelerators, time dilation directly affects the half-life of particles such a muons. Thousands of experiments have confirmed that the half-life of particles is affected by velocity in the exact way that Einstein predicted. Again, this is very hard to chalk down to coincidence.
Furthermore, experiments with the speed of light show that the speed of light is constant. Albert Michelson and Edward Morley tested the speed of light parallel to the Earth's velocity, and perpendicular to it; there was no difference in the results. From this we can conclude that either the experiment, and all the hundreds similar experiments performed after, were fundamentally flawed in precisely the same way (a stretch of the imagination). That the earth does not move around the sun. Or that the speed of light is independant of one's velocity. Indirectly, if these experiements are correct, this proves time dilation.
How? Consider a man on a spaceship travelling at high speeds. Upon the floor of his spaceship is a laser, a light sensor, both connected to a very accurate stopwatch. Upon the ceiling is a mirror. When the man presses a button, the laser beam is fired up at the mirror, and the stopwatch starts timing. The laser beam will bounce off the mirror, hit the light sensor, and the stopwatch will stop. Thus, the man will now know the time it takes for a laser beam to cover the distance between the laser beam, the mirror, and the light sensor.
With me so far? The problem comes when an observer upon the earth watches the spaceship zip past. To the man inside, the laser beam heads straight up and down, taking a purely vertical path. To the observer on earth, the spaceship moves horizontally whilst the experiment takes place, so to the observer, the laser-beam takes a longer, diagonal path. Because light is a constant speed, to the observer, the light beam travels at the same speed for both the observer and the man in the spacecraft. However, for the observer, the light beam travels a further distance than for the man in the spaceship, and therefore takes a longer time. So to the observer, the whole event takes a longer time than it does for the man inside the spaceship. That's time dilation.
Re:Did anybody say crackpottery? (Score:3, Insightful)
You are caught up in semantics and circular reasoning here.
Fundamental != Simple
Fundamental, in this context (fundamental laws of the universe) just means the foundation or base. Just because you can't break them down more doesn't mean it is simple, or humans can understand it, or laypeople can understand it.
If there is one unified theory of everything, it would be the most fundamental one, from which everything derives, but it could be mathematically and conceptually very complex indeed.
Theories p
Re:Dark BS (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Coffee fairies? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:And what else..? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Weak article (Score:4, Informative)
Re:It's strange, but possible (Score:5, Informative)
IAAP (I am a physicist), and I'm annoyed that this is modded "Informative".
The RHIC collaboration at Brookhaven has fewer pion jets than their complicated Monte Carlo simulations say should exist. One possible (and highly attention-getting) explanation is analogous to a black hole, in the same way that "slow light" [sciencenews.org] experiments can create something analogous to an event horizon. Neither experiment is actually creating a black hole , in the sense of a quantity of matter compressed to a region smaller than its Schwarzchild radius.
Regarding the original article, it's interesting speculation, but without any evidence to support it yet. For those interested in some of its underlying ideas (e.g. the vacuum as a superfluid), I strongly recommend Bob Laughlin's new popular book (readable by nonphysicists!) on the subject, A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down [amazon.com].
Re:Argh! (Score:4, Funny)
I can forgive you that you might not be up on the latest theories flying around the theoretical physics community. Really, I can.
But what kind of idiot are you that you don't understand the basic process of science??? Were you raised in the bible belt, and homeschooled on creationism??? Did you sleep through grade school science class???
Scientists put forward theories. Lots of them. Many are wrong. Those get disproven. The correct ones win, and then can get replaced by theories that are even closer to the truth.
On the cutting edge of knowlege, it's a normal and necessary part of the process to see many theories bouncing about at the same time. The point is that even the wrong ideas help us get closer to the right one.
Please blame this on Monday. Cause if you can't, you might have to face the fact that you're not just a layperson, but a really dumb one.
Re:Argh! (Score:4, Insightful)
There is no "Garbage" as you claim. Often more is learned from disproving theories than in thinking up the theory in the first place. There are many ways of approaching truth, and getting the "correct" theory is only one of them.
The mistake people make is taking every cutting-edge theory like it was gospel about the "NEW WAY THE UNIVERSE WORKS". Most if it is just interesting but unproved theory, nothing more. What is there to be jaded about? I really don't think you understand the process...
E
Re:Argh! (Score:3, Funny)
You are right. That is what religion is for.
-