Black Holes Not Black After All, Theorize Physicists 227
KentuckyFC (1144503) writes Black holes are singularities in spacetime formed by stars that have collapsed at the end of their lives. But while black holes are one of the best known ideas in cosmology, physicists have never been entirely comfortable with the idea that regions of the universe can become infinitely dense. Indeed, they only accept this because they can't think of any reason why it shouldn't happen. But in the last few months, just such a reason has emerged as a result of intense debate about one of cosmology's greatest problems — the information paradox. This is the fundamental tenet in quantum mechanics that all the information about a system is encoded in its wave function and this always evolves in a way that conserves information. The paradox arises when this system falls into a black hole causing the information to devolve into a single state. So information must be lost.
Earlier this year, Stephen Hawking proposed a solution. His idea is that gravitational collapse can never continue beyond the so-called event horizon of a black hole beyond which information is lost. Gravitational collapse would approach the boundary but never go beyond it. That solves the information paradox but raises another question instead: if not a black hole, then what? Now one physicist has worked out the answer. His conclusion is that the collapsed star should end up about twice the radius of a conventional black hole but would not be dense enough to trap light forever and therefore would not be black. Indeed, to all intents and purposes, it would look like a large neutron star.
Earlier this year, Stephen Hawking proposed a solution. His idea is that gravitational collapse can never continue beyond the so-called event horizon of a black hole beyond which information is lost. Gravitational collapse would approach the boundary but never go beyond it. That solves the information paradox but raises another question instead: if not a black hole, then what? Now one physicist has worked out the answer. His conclusion is that the collapsed star should end up about twice the radius of a conventional black hole but would not be dense enough to trap light forever and therefore would not be black. Indeed, to all intents and purposes, it would look like a large neutron star.
So black holes are hairy after all? (Score:3)
Or just not quite as dense as we thought.
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Or just not quite as dense as we thought.
They are brown and emit noxious gasses, duh.
Don't mind me, just feeding my inner troll...
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Interstellar Analingus
Mostly done by 1985... (Score:5, Interesting)
Frozen Star [google.ca] by George Greenstein had as a central theme that due to gravitational time dilation that we could never see a star collapse beyond its own event horizon: it would asymptotically approach it as arbitrarily close as we liked given unlimited time but never cross it. So as a natural consequence there was always a tiny but measurable probability that trapped light and thus information could escape.
Although this is a layperson's work, it is based on his published papers which provide a mathematical background.
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Re:Mostly done by 1985... (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't that the same thing as Hawking Radiation? I'm sure Dr. Hawking proposed and submitted work explaining the same thing.
In fact, here is what I am talking about [ucr.edu].
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No, these are different things.
The "Hawking radiation" is a mechanism, by which a black hole would not be completely black. Hawking proposed that two particles created outside the black hole with opposite velocities (to conserve momentum), one of these particles could escape the black hole if it's velocity was high enough (the other one would be captured). The energy for creating the two particles would be from the black hole itself.
He calculated that the probability of this happening is inverse to the mass
Re:Mostly done by 1985... (Score:5, Interesting)
Physicists originally called black holes "frozen stars" because the flow of time stops at the event horizon. Nothing can fall past an event horizon in outside time because that would take an infinitely long time to happen. It also can't happen from the perspective of an observer falling in, provided the outside universe has a finite lifetime. So you can never get a singularity.
I'm not really sure why that idea doesn't get more attention from today's physicists.
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From the perspective of someone falling in, the time to reach the singularity is not only finite, but quite short.
Assuming a static black hole exists in the first place. What if the black hole is changing on the time scale of the person falling in?
The Schwarzchild metric assumes that the mass distribution is stationary over some infinite duration. If black holes evaporate, then won't it evaporate before the person reaches it? What about cosmic expansion?
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From the perspective of someone falling in, the outside universe experiences an infinite amount of time. So if it's going to end, it's going to end before the infalling observer has even the very short period of time required to cross the event horizon.
If the universe doesn't end, it will have infinite time to cool off and the black to hole to evaporate from Hawking radiation. To conserve energy that means the infalling observer must observe a greater and greater amount of Hawking radiation the closer he
Re:Mostly done by 1985... (Score:5, Informative)
Gravitational time dilation affects the falling object, not the observer. If you claim that if I throw a baseball at a sufficiently large star then I'll eventually see the baseball slow down as it approaches it, then you need an explanation for the repulsive force.
Actually you probably won't actually "see" it slow down, it will eventually red-shift to be invisible (which is actually slowing down). Gravitational time dilation makes an object an object approaching the event horizon of a black hole to appear to slow down, taking an infinite time to reach the event horizon.
Not just physicists (Score:5, Funny)
physicists have never been entirely comfortable with the idea that regions of the universe can become infinitely density
I'm pretty sure that editors outside of /. have never been entirely comfortable with that idea either.
Orange? (Score:5, Funny)
Orange is the new black...hole...
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uhm? Was that a reference to Josie and the Pussy Cats?
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Netflix series. "Orange is the new black".
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doh! I've not seen it but i watched Josie and the Pussy Cats with my niece last night... if you haven't seen it it is a comedy about subliminal messages in pop music every time a new song comes on what's cool changes orange is the new black or blue is the new orange and all the kids run to the mall to buy all new clothes that color.
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What's that you say? Orange Star is the new Black Hole?
What about existing evidence? (Score:3)
I know that Black Holes aren't supposed to be observable - but I thought there were observations of other things, such as things being eaten by black holes and the interactions between a black hole's massive gravity well and the environment around it. If this study is right, shouldn't the astrophysicists who first observed the by-products of black holes have been able to see them?
Re:What about existing evidence? (Score:4, Informative)
they may not be truly black, in that electromagnetic radiation can actually escape from the surface, but that radiation can still be redshifted heavily and have insufficient energy to be detectable by us.
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Any light emitted from the "black hole" itself could also be dwarfed by the noise of all the other em coming from the accretion disk, making it nearly impossible to detected remotely.
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The best picture [nationalgeographic.com] we currently have of an exoplanet is about 6x6 pixels.
The closest black hole is heck of a lot further away.
Any observation we have of a black holes are extrapolations from gathered data.
Discoveries of stellar bodies are often presented as facts in the news but the discoveries themselves are little more than "This example would explain the data, together with a hundred other possible scenarios."
Next time you see a headline about discovering a star made entirely out of diamond or whatever, re
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Unless the objects weren't black holes but a massive amount of dark matter which is invisible across the visible light spectrum, and maybe our telescopes saw nothing, but there actually is a finite mass which does not emit light.
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Obtaining observations that are close enough to the event horizon for this theoretical model to make a difference are really really difficult to perform. For instance, our current best estimates for the radius of the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy are only able to nail it down to smaller than five and a half times the Schwarzschild radius. So I'm pretty sure that this model is well within current observational limits.
It probably won't be long, however, before we have observations that
If not black... (Score:3)
following the convention for naming stars that are not dense enough to ignite "brown dwarfs", we could name these new, less dense, singularities... "brown holes".
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"brown holes"
. . . and their wave function would be the "brown note" . . . ?
This is terrible!!! (Score:3)
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Now how is Michio Kaku going to portray black holes as marauding monsters that travel around like itinerant serial killers, gobbling up everything in their path?
I suggest bringing in a robot sidekick named Maximillian to improve ratings.
So ... (Score:3)
WTF does a large neutron star look like then?
Re:So ... (Score:5, Funny)
Chicken. It looks like chicken.
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Oh, well then, why didn't they just say so?
I knew chicken was the universal standin for what things taste like, I had no idea it was also used for what things look like. :-P
Re:So ... (Score:5, Funny)
Imagine a perfectly spherical chicken...
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Why did the perfectly spherical chicken cross the road?
To get to the black hole (or neutron star).
Seriously, can we get a can analogy (yeah, I know, imagine a perfectly spherical car, bastards! ;-)
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Seriously, can we get a can analogy (yeah, I know, imagine a perfectly spherical car, bastards! ;-)
Neutron star: imagine what happens when you trade in your Ford Aerostar under the Cash-for-Clunkers program...
Such a car is not massive enough to become a black hole consuming all your gas money, but bigger than a Crown-V (aka Chandrasekhar limit) which is the largest car that ends it's life as a white dud (aka dwarf).
Re:So ... (Score:5, Funny)
Like a small neutron star. Only bigger.
Infinite density (Score:5, Funny)
physicists have never been entirely comfortable with the idea that regions of the universe can become infinitely density.
They've clearly never been to DC. I'm convinced that regions of the universe are infinitely dense.
Or, maybe there's no paradox at all. (Score:3)
Or... maybe it doesn't devolve into a single state at all. We can't actually see what goes on inside of black hole... but if our assumptions about what actually happens appear to create a paradox, then maybe it's our assumptions aren't valid, rather than the original basic concept of what a black hole supposedly is. I believe that the concept that black holes are necessarily singularities may be flawed. Space is so distorted by gravity in their vicinity that straight lines which intersect their event horizon never exit it, but I do not think that means that all of a black hole's mass is necessarily at its center, or even necessarily collapsing inexorably towards its center. Its center is just its center of mass.
And yeah, I know that astrophysicists with a vastly more qualifications than I have came up with these ideas, but in the end, an argument from authority does not make one actually right.
Re:Or, maybe there's no paradox at all. (Score:5, Informative)
And yeah, I know that astrophysicists with a vastly more qualifications than I have came up with these ideas, but in the end, an argument from authority does not make one actually right.
This is actually one of my nits with these kinds of articles. When someone says "Now one physicist has worked out the answer", the use of the phrase "the answer" means in English that the question is now closed. He has found THE answer, meaning the one and only answer, hence the use of the word 'the' instead of the word 'a'. In reality, the article should say "Now one physicist has worked out a possible answer". What he has presented is a theory that he believes is consistent with known physics and observations. That is all it is.
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Or... maybe it doesn't devolve into a single state at all. We can't actually see what goes on inside of black hole... but if our assumptions about what actually happens appear to create a paradox, then maybe it's our assumptions aren't valid, rather than the original basic concept of what a black hole supposedly is. I believe that the concept that black holes are necessarily singularities may be flawed. Space is so distorted by gravity in their vicinity that straight lines which intersect their event horizon never exit it, but I do not think that means that all of a black hole's mass is necessarily at its center, or even necessarily collapsing inexorably towards its center. Its center is just its center of mass.
And yeah, I know that astrophysicists with a vastly more qualifications than I have came up with these ideas, but in the end, an argument from authority does not make one actually right.
The theory of black holes did not come from any observations of physical phenomenon, it came from studying Einstein's theories. The math suggested the possibility of singularities, but at first no one thought they would actually exist in our universe. Of course now we know that black holes DO exist, so those theories are validated. Now we're just trying to figure out how to reconcile with OTHER theories.
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But that's exactly what they are saying.
You need to differentiate. Blackholes are NOT singularities. A blackhole is the collection of phenomena and objects in an area of spacetime. It is believe that at the center of the blackhole is a singularity. What this new theory suggests is that there is not a singularity there, but instead that it just behaves very similar to one.
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why information should collapse to a single state inside of a black hole?
Information does not want to be free, after all?
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How do you get at the notion that no singularities necessarily means that there are no black holes?
Can't a volume of space be sufficiently bent by gravity so as to not allow light to escape from it, without there being a singularity at the center?
Wait (Score:2)
can some explain why information can't be lost? this is slightly confusing and that assumption makes it seem like they're building a lot of theory on a pretty shaky foundation.
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Re:Wait (Score:4, Interesting)
1) Information is another term for entropy.
2) Thermodynamic says that potential energy and entropy are inversely proportional in an isolated system.
3) Thermodynamics furthers says that the entropy of an isolated system always increases until it reaches a minimum potential energy state. Why? If the entropy of a system decreases, that implies that potential energy is increasing. But if it's an isolated system, where did that potential energy come from?
Because black holes exist within an isolated system that is the universe, if they were able to decrease the entropy of the universe then that would imply that they're generating potential energy. Remember that capacity for work is the same as potential energy, so black holes would then be the equivalent of perpetual motion machines because the expenditure of potential energy (i.e. work) creates more entropy, which would be swallowed by a black hole, which would generate more potential energy, ad infinitum. That state of affairs just wouldn't seem to mirror our larger understanding of the universe.
Also, consider that what we call "time" is effectively the same as an increase in entropy. That is, the universe is evolving to a minimum potential energy state, which is the same as "aging". If you could decrease entropy you'd effectively be making time go backward.
Of course, all this is premised on our definition of information, entropy, potential energy, etc. But as far as we know they're extremely solid and coherent concepts, and it makes more sense that some supposed phenomenon which violates that model is more likely to be false than those concepts are.
Anyhow, I'm not a physicist. I don't even play one on TV. I hope real physicists correct my mistakes.
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I think it's an extrapolation of the idea that if you had a perfect knowledge of a system's current state and the laws governing that system you could then predict any future state and any prior state.
Re:Wait (Score:4, Informative)
can some explain why information can't be lost? this is slightly confusing and that assumption makes it seem like they're building a lot of theory on a pretty shaky foundation.
It's actually not as mind bending as you might think.
Quantum mechanics is "Time Symmetrical" meaning that, the laws of physics work the same irrelevant of the direction of time.
This is only at the quantum scale so real world stuff doesn't work so hot.
But take a quantum particle falling into a blackhole...
If the blackhole consumed it, destroying all information about it... if you reversed time, the particle would never exist, and never be ejected back into space.
If, however, time slows as it approached the blackhole and the particle never actually crossed the event horizon... then if you reverse time, time would speed up and the particle would eventually be flung away.
This all depends on you accepting the standard model, and the current interpenetration of quantum physics. They are becoming more rock solid every day however, it would take some pretty amazing discoveries to break them.
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If, however, time slows as it approached the blackhole and the particle never actually crossed the event horizon
Can someone please explain this. It seems to be accepted that not only does the object's time slows down as it approaches the event horizon, but it's velocity does also. I don't get that. If an object is moving away from me at 0.9999c, I could expect is to actually be moving away from me at that speed, not slowing down relative to me. If from my perspective an object has stopped moving, then it is no longer moving relative to me and its time should be pretty much the same to my reference.
I seem to be miss
String theory deals with singularities similarly (Score:3)
IIRC, string theorists have also proposed the idea that there are no singularities. In their model, the gravitational collapse of a star of sufficient mass causes all the strings of its component particles to coalesce into one highly-energetic string, sort of a super-particle. The information content of the original matter would be preserved in the vibration pattern of the final string.
Radius? (Score:2)
Could this 'negative energy' zone be the source of (Score:2)
Dark Energy?
Would a 'negative energy' zone potentially produce Dark Energy, which is the repulsive force accelerating inflation?
Does this explain why inflation is increasing? More 'black-hole-type' objects with more of this negative energy space in existence... creating more Dark Energy...
infinitely density (Score:2)
To summarize (Score:2)
Another way of looking at it (Score:2)
In fact, this makes perfect sense. Consider that we *know* black holes evaporate via Hawking radiation. I haven't read the paper, but unless I miss my guess, what he's effectively suggesting is that the evaporation starts as the star collapses, and becomes stronger as it grows more dense, to the point where a balance is reached, *above* the Schwartschild Radius.
mark
Of course (Score:2)
Why was I an underachiever? (Score:2)
Infinitely dense? (Score:2)
IANAA (I Am Not An Astrophysicist) but I was under the impression that black holes have a non-zero Schwarzschild radius (and therefore volume). Together with a finite mass, how does one get infinity for density?
Yes, there are things about warped space that may give odd local answers frome a classical physics perspective. But using the term 'infinie density' seems to be an over simplification that is misleading.
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physicists have never been entirely comfortable with the idea that regions of the universe can become infinitely density.
Infinitely density. Wow. The Engrish need helped.
Re:Do Slashdot editors actually edit? (Score:4, Funny)
What you say! These is much English goodly!
Re:Do Slashdot editors actually edit? (Score:5, Informative)
No, you are dead wrong, completely and utterly wrong. "For all intents and purposes" has been down-grammaticised into "for all intensive purposes". The latter has no actual meaning.
Re:Do Slashdot editors actually edit? (Score:5, Funny)
"For all intents and purposes" has been down-grammaticised into "for all intensive purposes". The latter has no actual meaning.
That is untrue! For all intensive purposes i use an exercise machine!
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Your joke is not very funny. :/
You must be a visitor from Colonslash. That's another site, with a different posting culture. This is Slashdot, where anything is deemed "funny" by making comments that are equal parts clever and obtuse, in reference to a parent posting.
There are plusses awarded in "funny" for meta-references to the topic of posting, and the specific modes of posting, when used in the cited context.
You will have to forgive me, I began as a USENET chatbot, skipped IRC and was ported directly to slashcode.
Re:wat (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:wat (Score:4, Insightful)
A lot of phenomena in astrophysics are ridiculous, but real.
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Infinity and infinitesimals are abstract concepts. They do not occur in reality by their very definition as neither can ever be reached.
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Set theory, and Kurt Godel's Incompleteness. No Xeno needed. ;-)
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Re:wat (Score:5, Insightful)
Define a circle.
Do circles exist in reality, or only in mathematical models?
What do engineering artifacts, as approximations of circles, bear in relation to "real" circles?
Are infinities actual, or are they mathematical descriptions for mental extrapolations based in observed phenomena?
Do mathematical models display consistency with real, observable phenomena or with any mental extrapolation? Which one is more "real"? Why?
Mathematics can only describe the set of perceptions, IMHO. When they describe unperceived "realities" they enter the realm of fictions or metaphysics.
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The Universe tends to go on doing whatever it's doing without regard for the mathematics of it.
Re: wat (Score:5, Insightful)
What if ONLY infinities exist? After all, what could lie outside them?
In fact, there'd be only "Infinity" all sense of plural or singular being reduced to non-statements.
Wow.
Have you ever REALLY looked at your fingernails, man?
Re:wat (Score:5, Interesting)
Since no one has actually peeked inside of a black hole we really can't tell for certain.
What we do know is that when we do the math on our models what we find are things approaching infinity. Sometimes these are just caused by using the wrong coordinate system, but other times when we change coordinate systems, the singularity still exists.
It's important to note that when speaking about infinity don't fall into the fallacy of treating it as a value. You cannot have an infinite amount of something, but you can have something which has infinite characteristics. Consider Hilbert's Hotel which is an example of the hilarity found when trying to add finite numbers and infinity together. The expression " + 1" is meaningless because you can't add a value to infinity any more than you can add "a + 1".
What's actually happening in Hilbert's Hotel is the addition of aleph numbers with finite numbers, which you can do, but has silly results. Aleph-0 + 1 = Aleph-0. But this just describes the extent of the set, suppose we took a sum and looked at it:
1 + 2 + 3 + ... n + 1 = 2 + 2 + 3 + ... n
And no matter what you try to do with it, that extra one is still hiding in the sum. If you take this new set and subtract it by all of the natural numbers, you should be left with the result of 1. One of the most irritating things is when people say you can do things like you can in Hilbert's Hotel, writing it off like it's some quirk of infinity. But it's not. If you shifted all of the guests over to only even rooms, you would still have the same number of guests and rooms.
2((n) n) = 2 + 4 + 6 + ... 2n
You've effectively just doubled the number of rooms. It's a sleight of hand that breaks the rules. "But!" you may say, "You have infinite many rooms, so of course you have a room at 2n!" If you do think this then you're still caught up thinking about infinity as a literal value. You don't have a room at 2n, your rooms only extend to n, and now half of your guests (which is still an infinite many) don't have rooms, but are left to stand out in an endless hallway.
In essence, one kind of infinity does not necessarily equal another kind. /rant
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I'm a professional mathematician and instructor and usually only lurk, but I feel obliged to say this -- you sound like you read a Wikipedia article, poorly, and I advise fellow ./ers not to take this post about Hilbert's hotel seriously.
None of the results are silly. They are all a logical consequence of the axioms of the system. Human beings are quite good a reasoning about finite situations (finitely many objects and finitely many operations on those objects), but humans are regularly surprised by result
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How many finite gradations to a circle?
Inquiring minds want to know.
P.S. Do "circles" exist? I have only encountered engineering approximations. Believing in "circles" is akin to a kind of theism, I think.
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Hand me the circle you say "exists". :-)
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They certainly do! It's just not something you can model perfectly. And just because we can't create a perfect model - or completely understand a thing or concept doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
You got that backwards. A perfect circle is perfectly described with pi, which is irrational, not infinite. It's something you can model perfectly, because you can use this creature called pi in your equation, but it's not something you can manufacture perfectly since even if you're capable of Planck-scale manufacturing, you can't do sub-Planck-scale manufacturing, and there ends your quest for perfection.
Generally speaking the models are much more perfect than reality.
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Hand me one of these.
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Even trained mathematicians can fall into that trap. In Infinity and the Mind, Rudy Rucker made the mistake of talking about a mountain that was "more than infinitely tall," which is nothing more than gibberish. I don't recommend that book to anybody, and this is just one of the many reasons I was disappointed by it.
Correct: many phenoma in astrophysics are ideas (Score:5, Insightful)
No there are many ideas in astrophysics. We don't know if they are real.
Dark matter? Maybe or maybe not. Dark energy? Maybe or maybe not.
Hawking radiation? It is an idea, it hasn't been proven or disproven.
Speed of light limitation? Probably, but how are neutrinos that have mass going 99.9999% the speed of light? That should require almost infinite energy shouldn't it?
Big bang? A large body of evidence points to a time limit to the beginning of the universe, but cosmic background radiation is the only stronger evidence of a big bang --- yet this could have another explanation.
Cosmic inflation? Could be a non-starter for reasons we currently don't have a handle on --- case in point, it is only happening *far away*. Supernova are used as standard candles, but what if we had different looking supernova 10 billion years ago and our measurements are wrong, therefore inflation isn't happening.
Astrophysics is an emerging field, even now. There are few ways to test all the ideas.
Many of the theories of the exotic blackholes rest precariously on a shaky house of cards, because there is no convenient way to test the ideas.
Re:Correct: many phenoma in astrophysics are ideas (Score:5, Informative)
Speed of light limitation? Probably, but how are neutrinos that have mass going 99.9999% the speed of light?
Electrons and positrons in LEP, the predecessor to LHC were going about 99.99999996% of the speed of light. That was far from infinite energy, and not even a lot by cosmic ray standards. For a neutrino to go 99.9999 would need about ~70 eV of energy, which is an order of magnitude larger than energetic chemical reactions, but quite tame by nuclear reactions. Nuclear reactions can easily produce neutrinos with energies from 0.1-10 MeV, up to 100,000 times as much.
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"Real" - as in "have mathematical models, proven valid by consistency or extrapolation with other mathematical models."
After all, maps ARE territory, when you will NEVER have the opportunity for actual direct experience. ;-)
Re:wat (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, well... your MOM is infinitely dense.
Yours is not infinitely dense. After all, everyone penetrates her.
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Black holes aren't "infinitely dense" because that is ridiculous
You're misinterpreting the meaning of "infinite" here.
You're assuming density measurement has an infinite value. Like "How many dollars are there?" Well, you could have any number of dollars from 1 to infinity.
That's not how density is measured.
Another type of measurement is "What angle is the corner of that triangle?"
That could be anywhere from 1 to 359 degrees (rounding to whole numbers)
It's kind of like a percentage.
Infinite density would be like saying the angle is 360 Degrees. That breaks the triangle.
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A lesson about infinity from a guy who fails at basic geometry... I think I'll skip this one.
Re:wat (Score:4, Insightful)
Who says I was talking about a planar triangle? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... [wikipedia.org] :-p
Ok, I was... but the oldest geometry typo since the pyramids does not invalidate relativity.
Why is information movement a paradox? (Score:2)
Just because the information might have gone somewhere (inside a black hole) where we can't determine the information any more doesn't mean the information was lost to the universe.
It just means it was lost to us (and others on the outside of the event horizon.) It takes a pretty enormous ego (as an observer) to think that it matters to information's existence whether some particular external observer (like us) can detect the information.
So I don't get the paradox at all. The information is just inside the
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My understanding of time in physics and thermodynamics is that time-forward is the direction in which information spreads out in space (at least on average). That is the meaning of increasing entropy. Time is not symmetrical backwards forwards, once you take into account the spatial location of information.
What this would mean is that as time passes forwards, information about other things becomes less and less accessible/available to an observer at any particular point/trajectory, because the (same amount
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Some people are quite dense, though...
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After I read TFS, I am become infinitely hilarity!
Re:wat (Score:5, Funny)
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What's the biggest run of consecutive pages of equations in it?
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Does it have infinitely density?
After trying to look at it, I feel like I'm infinitely dense. Does that count?
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There is one unfortunate difference between Jackson and MLK. (well, unfortunate in the case of MLK.)
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Why is everyone so uncomfortable with the idea that something can be lost forever?
Because no one has figured out how to get the equations of quantum mechanics to work in only one direction without breaking them. And those equations are on really solid ground at this point, or your CPU wouldn't work.
If we're exceptionally lucky, rationalizing quantum mechanics and general relativity will finally reveal what time is and why everything in the universe appears to only proceed in one 'direction' in time. Don't hold your breath though. It's going to take a very strange kind of mind to figur
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Because the gravity is too intense for even the neutrons to support its weight and there's currently no other known force or mechanism known that can stop the collapse. You might be right, but something new would have to be discovered or theorized to allow for that possibility.
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