Stephen Hawking Suggests Black Holes Are Possible Portals To Another Universe (scienceworldreport.com) 230
An anonymous reader shares an article on Science World Report: Stephen Hawking, in a recent lecture held at the Harvard University, claimed that black holes could be portals to a parallel universe. The celebrated physicist spoke at length about black holes and suggested that they neither store materials absorbed by them nor physical information about the object that created them. Known as the information paradox, the theory goes against the scientific rule that information on a system belonging to a particular time can be used to understand its state at a different time. Over the years, it has been speculated that black holes do not retain information about the stars from which they are formed, except storing their electrical charge, angular momentum and mass. According to Hawking, as per that theory, it was believed that identical black holes might be formed by an infinite quantity of matter configurations. However, quantum mechanics has signaled the opposite by revealing that black holes could only be formed by particles with explicit wavelengths. If the characteristics of the bodies that create black holes are not deprived, then they include a lot of information that is not revealed to the outside world, according to the physicist. "For more than 200 years, we have believed in the science of determinism, that is that the laws of science determine the evolution of the universe" Stephen Hawking said. If information was lost in black holes, we wouldn't be able to predict the future because the black hole could emit any collection of particles."This is in contrast to some of Hawking's earlier views. In 2014, for instance, Hawking suggested that black holes don't exist, at least not like we think.
Determinism? (Score:2)
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought quantum theory killed that 100 years ago so whats the problem?
Re:Determinism? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Determinism? (Score:5, Funny)
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Or... the event/act-ual creation of a quantum computer changes the universe in/which it does.
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Nope. It does really mean that they are undetermined, regardless of our measurements. There is no hidden variables. Quantum world is *really* that strange/uncanny,
The whole "there are no hidden variables" thing is just an quick English phrase standing in for complex math. Don't read to much into it.
The wave function is completely deterministic, forwards and backwards. Real-world observables like position and momentum are not state captured by the wave function - nothing in classical physics is, really. It's the mapping between the wave function and what we can observe that is non-deterministic (well, again, the math is more complex than the English, but it's part
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Before we go down the road of namecalling, how about trying to offer up a proof? Most of us do not learn quantum mechanics in school, nor is it relevant to our lives in a direct way, thus all we have are vague and imprecise english to summarize things, and as it happened, most of the key people in this field were German. And that's why we use math and not english to talk about science.
My attempt, and I am probably wrong I took one semester of modern physics to satisfy a degree requirement, is that if p=mv,
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It seems we are all alone in this together.
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"Until you realise that even a infinite multiverse is not large enough to contain Infinite^infinite universes."
Georg Cantor, one of the endless array of white phones in front of you is ringing. And you will not find out which one if you spend the rest of your life looking for it.
Not quite logical (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Not quite logical (Score:5, Interesting)
"If the mass completely leaves the universe for another universe, why would the gravity be left behind?"
I wondered something similar when they kept saying the singularity in a black hole has zero size. Well something with no dimentions doesn't exist so how can it still have a gravitational field? Unless because time is so slowed inside a black hole relative to outside that from an outside observers point of view the singularity essentially never forms.
Re:Not quite logical (Score:5, Interesting)
I am not an astrophysicist but i thought the reason a black hole would still have mass and gravitation is that not only is the mass compressed to a geometric point but the resulting gravitation that causes time to appear to effectively stop also compresses the space that contains it.
Basically that if you could be an observer within the geometric point the amount of space within that point would be near infinite and the surrounding space outside that point would be unobservable.
Sounds like our universe to me. It's a lot better than that BS "we may be a simulation" that was floated here a few days ago.
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Calling the Universe a simulation is pointless. It certainly could be, but the simple fact that it shares some characteristics of what we would call a "simulation" doesn't make it a "simulated universe".
That's like saying, "I think quantization is messy, so I am going to assume there is a Universe that doesn't have it because that would be less fake, or something".
We have no frame of reference outside of the Universe. Everything else is mere speculation and completely unscientific. Assuming that the Univ
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So are a lot of paranoid delusions. Internally completely self-consistent. Doesn't make them true.
Even he would have to agree, his theory is full of holes. He just claims that the holes in his theory are features. :-) Try the fish.
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Of course, I didn't say you *need* to believe in God, but that if we're going to go off the rails like this, you *might as well*.
Honestly, someone who can program an entire universe is a better candidate for the whole God thing than some whitebeard in the sky, anyway. As for the more extreme characteristics of such a being, I agree that the possibilities are endless and include limited beings, but they could also include an Omniscient, Almighty, Perpetual and/or Infinite Being too.
In any event, it's this s
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Wake up! You're dreaming!!!
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Also we still can't retrieve the information about the matter that entered without leaving this universe.
This is exactly the stuff that Hawking was contradicted on by Juan Maldacena, Lenny Susskind and so on. You can get that information back out, you just have to wait for the black hole to dissolve. That won't happen much until the ambient temperature of the universe drops lower than that of the black hole, and even then it's slow. Something like ten to the hundred years for a stellar-sized black hole to disappear completely.
But what those guys demonstrated is that the hawking radiation carries the informatio
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I thought the fully deterministic universe wasn't all that popular these days, particularly with QM mucking things up, particularly at the earliest moments after the Big Bang, when quantum effects dwarfed gravity.
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I think you're mixing up what is meant by determinism. Quantum effects do not appear to be deterministic, in that individual events have some degree of randomness or unpredictability, but QM is probabilistic in that the sum of all quantum events will tend in one direction or another (i.e. the history of a single photon cannot be known with complete certainty, but the paths of a beam of light made up of billions or trillions of photons can be predicted).
In this regard, while the laws that influenced the Earl
Stealing from Disney.... (Score:5, Interesting)
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I haven't seen that movie since I was a little kid (and I liked it!), and now I'm afraid to (because I probably won't like it). Dare I?
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I'm no stranger to science, but this is still one of my favorite movies. I suppose that I tend to watch movies with the eye of a child and not that of a critic though.
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Sounds like a rap battle between NgDT [youtube.com] and MC Hawking [youtube.com] is about to go down!
Sphere of Annihilation (Score:5, Funny)
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Always a good time to introduce the Dark Sun campaign, IMHO. That's always played like an outer ring of hell.
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least plausible (Score:5, Interesting)
"Portals to another universe" sounds like the least plausible model of black holes. More plausible are non-singular models in which the matter simply transitions into another state inside the black hole; examples are the gravastar [wikipedia.org] and the dark energy star [wikipedia.org]; there are many other possibilities.
It also seems odd to me that people would cling to the "information paradox" as if there were some good reason to believe it. If you truly believe that there is a singularity at the center of a black hole, why wouldn't you also believe that it can destroy information? Conversely, if you try to preserve information in a black hole, it seems to me that you are effectively already modeling an object other than a singularity.
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It also seems odd to me that people would cling to the "information paradox" as if there were some good reason to believe it. If you truly believe that there is a singularity at the center of a black hole, why wouldn't you also believe that it can destroy information? Conversely, if you try to preserve information in a black hole, it seems to me that you are effectively already modeling an object other than a singularity.
Well, the reason they don't like information being destroyed is because of this thing called the Second Law of Thermodynamics. If that information is being destroyed, then the Second Law of Thermodynamics is false, and then we've got to readdress all of physics as one of the foundation premises is wrong. Unless, of course, the black hole goes to another universe, then we are not in a closed system and all is good once again. However, keep in mind that any time that physicist like Hawking say things like "in
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Yes, you're right that this is linked to the second law of thermodynamics. But in thermodynamics, this law is actually an axiom based on the kinds of macroscopic systems people have observed. And in statistical mechanics, it is a subtle statistical statement about large systems and their evolution over time, concepts that break down for black holes. Finally, invalidating a physical "law" under some extreme conditions usually has little effect on existing physics; we still teach and use classical mechanics
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I have no idea how it is different, not having attended the lecture. I just thought it was worth pointing out that other people have thought about these issues before and come up with various explanations. As for Mazur and Mottola's gravastars, it's possible that Hawking's lecture referred to their model and the summary just misattributed it to Hawking and t
Paradigm longevity (Score:3)
"For more than 200 years, we have believed in the science of determinism..."
Our culture being steeped in Newtonian mechanics (where everything is fundamentally predictable) for a very long time has had a strong psychological influence, even after QM comes along to show that determinism itself is very questionable as a principle.
Supervenience [wikipedia.org] is a trickier question than most realize, even top-flight physicists.
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"For more than 200 years, we have believed in the science of determinism..."
Our culture being steeped in Newtonian mechanics (where everything is fundamentally predictable) for a very long time has had a strong psychological influence, even after QM comes along to show that determinism itself is very questionable as a principle.
Supervenience [wikipedia.org] is a trickier question than most realize, even top-flight physicists.
Hawking is arguing that, in order for quantum mechanics to work, a black hole has to be deterministic (albeit in a way that we could never possibly check).
Schrodinger's equation is deterministic (unitary). It's measurements that introduce uncertainty, oddly enough by making some things certain.
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Although there are crackpot physicists who point to weird result
and the proposal for testing it is? (Score:2)
One can possibly fit many (infinite) mathematical models here, no? So I am dubious if this ever gets resolved.
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Actually, new mathematical models create black holes sucking in all manner of discourse and reasoning. What fails to flow out of them are particles of Enlightenment. That's what make them so devious.
Now build a stargate to be able to safly use it (Score:2)
Now build a stargate to be able to safely use it!
Consoling a friend? (Score:5, Funny)
Fry> Don't cry Bender. Nobody really knows what happens in a black hole. It's possible she's still alive in another dimension somewhere. Right, Professor?
Professor> Oh why yes, absolutely!
*Professor turns to Zoidberg*
Professor> Not a chance.
*Professor mimes being hanged*
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#blackholesmatter
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Haha, that quote is exactly what was going through my mind as I read this abstract, too.
The comment below by Reaper9889 is correct and thus highlights the fact that one could argue that the black hole goes to another universe but still kills whatever passes through. Nevertheless, this shows the silliness of the whole idea suggested now by Hawking. Any information that might be transferred to another universe would be essentially garbled beyond all recognition such that it would have only a nominal connectio
Re:Consoling a friend? (Score:5, Informative)
We DO know that you will get ripped to shreds before you get inside, though.
If the black hole is big enough you can cross the event horizon without feeling so much as a pinch.
Re:Consoling a friend? (Score:4, Informative)
You're right, for a supermassive black hole, like the one at the center of our galaxy, the gravitational shear between what you experience at your head and your feet is basically like what you'd experience on the surface of Earth.
However, if you did manage to get far enough in, with all the oddness that implies, you would experience increasing shear as you approached the singularity. Eventually, it would become strong enough to rip you apart.
A "normal" stellar mass black hole would rip you apart almost immediately because the shear would be very high much less further in.
Either situation is probably academic, as you'd have been charbroiled long before you entered the event horizon by the X-rays and extremely hot matter in orbit which has been accelerated by the black hole to extreme velocities and energies.
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Well, yes, but you don't just stop at the Event Horizon. That's just the boundary within which there is no theoretical escape even for light. A bigger black hole just means you get to wait a little longer before being ripped apart by tidal forces as you approach the singularity.
Um, My Mind Is More Of A Portal (Score:2, Informative)
Another Possible Reality (Score:2)
Since the escape velocity from a black hole "exceeds" the speed of light, particles arriving at the event horizon have a lot of energy. The energy from these particles is enough for the creation of another universe. The space inside a black hole expands (in a direction orthogonal to our space dimensions) forming the big bang starting that universe.
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The energy from these particles is enough for the creation of another universe.
Is it? How much is that in jiggawatts then?
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It means they wouldn't reach the speed of light.
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Mas can't move through space at the speed of light, however space-time itself can move faster than the speed of light and carry the mass with it. That's what happened during the big bang, and why distant galaxies can be observed receding from us faster than the speed of light.
Nature abhors a vacuum and singularities (Score:2)
Open your eyes. (Score:2)
Go outside. Open your eyes. You have just destroyed a host of quantum information - the quantum measurement process is not unitary.
Why are we more special than a black hole? Why should we assume that we can cause the wave function to collapse just by looking at the stars at night but that a blackhole cannot do so even when it eats a star whole?
I am with Penrose on this - it is simplest to assume that quantum systems will in fact no longer evolve unitarily under gravity, e.g.,, in black holes. Information w
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Portals to another universe (Score:2)
claimed that black holes could be portals to a parallel universe.
Portal to a parallel universe in which you no longer exist, or time stops for you, forever; if you are foolish enough to fly into one.
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time stops for you, forever
*facepalm*
Blackhole mystisim (Score:2)
The so called information paradox is more likely to be a result of people fooling themselves than any strange happenings requiring exotic explanations involving other universes. An open box is always the low hanging explanation that conveniently explains away everything you don't understand.
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Random guy on Internet claims physicists are wrong, misunderstands optics and doesn't seem to understand gravity lenses don't work when they are really close by and filled with fucking stars. But hey, he must be a fucking genius.
But of course, it's an electric universe advocate.
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> Random guy on Internet claims physicists are wrong,
Riiiight, because you know more then Halton C. Arp, a professional astronomer who, earlier in his career, was Edwin Hubble's assistant, and that you've personally verified he made mistake in every object documented in his "Quasars, Redshifts and Controversies" [amazon.com], right?
And you're published papers are where again?
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Appeal to authority, to someone who has been dead for decades and was an astronomer, not a physicist.
But do go on showing what a lunatic you are. The scientific community has long moved past nonsense like the electric universe. It's just idiocy adopted by useless fucktards who are too lazy and too stupid, but so desperately want attention. You're a nobody, and you will forever be a nobody.
He is right... (Score:2)
If the universe is just a computer simulation... (Score:3)
Need to be a SMB (Score:2)
unfortunately the common or garden tens of stellar mass black holes have too much gravitational gradient (tides) to be used
You would need to have a galaxy centre super massive black hole (millions or billions stellar mass) thats not feeding at the time
Ignore it (Score:2)
cool. So where is door from others to here? (Score:2)
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Why do we need alternate explanations for Hawking Radiation? We've never even observed the stuff, we just think it exists based on our theoretical understanding of black holes. If we don't think it's created the same way now, who says it needs to exist at all?
Also our previous understand of Hawking Radiation had it decreasing with the size of the black hole. With this change it seems the opposite would be true.
Stephen's mind is a portal to another universe. (Score:2)
You go first, okay? (Score:2)
OK Professor Falcon -I mean Hawking, please be the first to test your theory.
Relatively few people, myself included, really want to be the first to jump in black hole to see if you are right.
Information coming here (Score:2)
Since one of the key points of science is that there isn't a special point for your observations (for example the Earth isn't a special case) then we should be seeing information entering our universe from other ones. So what does this information look like after it passes through a black hole and how does it appear to the other universe? If we could look for that then it would be a good test for the theory. Or does the information just pass into a corresponding black hole in the other universe and isn't ab
May have lost his marbles... (Score:2)
Or he may be on to something. At this stage in a typical career of a great physicist, both things are possible. Hawking has always been a great creative thinker in his area of expertise, what he currently claims is not out of character and may well be valid. Outside if his area of expertise, he is a hack, see his uninformed rantings about AI for example. Also not untypical for this development stage of a great physicist. But what really matters is what other physicists think about his statements about physi
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"But what really matters is what other physicists think about his statements about physical things."
What really matters is if his theory is a better model of reality than another theory. Reality doesn't care if your theory has a consensus of respected people.
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So you want to do science without people involved? That does not actually work in reality ...
Sure, if there were a way to do it this way, i.e. to have some impersonal and reliable way to test whether a statement about physics is true, that would be preferable. But no such mechanism exists.
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Your knowledge of the history of science is rather flawed, quite a few giants in the field worked alone for years and achieved great things.
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He's an idiot is he? Oh ok then, if you say so. You'll be able to point us to some papers you've written disproving some of his theories then won't you Mr Genius.
Re:Sane people suggest (Score:5, Insightful)
The guy's account is called "jewsdid911". I'm thinking you don't want to see the kinds of papers he writes.
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If it wasn't them, who was it?
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Maybe it was you.
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**Thank you, people of the Jewsish faith, for giving the Unites States its emergency services telephone number! It is much easier to use than having to know the number for the local police department everywhere you go!!**
Mod jewsdid911 +1 Informative, pls.
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You insist that when I type '>' I really meant to abbreviate Sergeant, and you will go to your grave convinced that 'href' is just me fucking up 'heed' multiple times every day. But when I type 'Jewsish,' you're like, "Shit yeah man looks right to me!"
Get your shit together.
Love,
-floppy
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Read the guy's posts. He blames Jews for pornography.
Re:Sane people suggest (Score:5, Insightful)
Okay, idiot parent troll/spite/whatever aside, there is a small kernel of something that did strike my mind.
Hawking was once incredibly brilliant, in spite of the massive debilitation from ALS, a normally fatal disease that he's (so far) outlived by at least a factor or four.
That said, insofar as his brilliance, I think that time has sadly passed, or has slipped enough that seriously, unless there's solid math or observation backing it up, maybe the press should stop breathlessly reporting everything he says.
Like in this case, for instance. Where is the math for it? Seriously?
Re:Sane people suggest (Score:5, Insightful)
For Hawking, it's worth listening to his intuition even if he doesn't yet back it with science. It's not like he's some quack that has never made a solid discovery. Maybe he or someone else will take his ideas and put forth the work to reconcile them.
I agree that the press should never report his ideas as fact or even probable until there is an adequate basis for that claim. For now this needs to be classified as musings of Hawking, and that's all.
Re:Sane people suggest (Score:5, Insightful)
Agreed. Intuition is a valid part of scientific endeavour, though not many will agree on that. There should be a lot of freedom in how one constructs a hypothesis. It's still a guess. If it's completely grounded in experiment then it's not a guess.
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It's not "waffling", Slashdot's lack of understanding of cosmology notwithstanding.
What Hawking said in 2014 was that black holes - in the context of disjoint regions of space irrevocably disconnected from our spacetime - do not exist.
What Hawking is said now is... the same thing.
Hawking did waffle on black holes, once; he was once of the view that information was lost irretrievably beyond the event horizon, but he conceded based on a large scientific debate that arose that this view was mistaken. While he
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And speculation != waffling, so we're at least twice removed from direct evidence of Hawking's supposed senility.
In any case what sets Hawking apart isn't infallibility; it's creativity. If you want to be a creative genius you can't worry too much about being wrong, any more than you can be a chess master and worry too much about losing material. It's part of the game.
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Look, there won't be one universe, because anything that can create one universe can create N universes.
Why? The act of creating the universe may render it impossible to create others.
Re: Spiraling galaxies (Score:2)
It's called drag. Gravity of the black hole pulls on the nearest matter and that matter pulls on the matter nearest to it. If black holes are moving dark matter as well then that's all the mass you need to move the rest of a galaxy.
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No, the mass of a black hole does grow. The mass of black holes can be measured.
There are three things (and only three things) you can measure about a singularity inside a black hole: its mass, its charge, and its angular momentum. Obviously, for the black hole itself, you can measure the area of the event horizon as well, but the event horizon is not actually the singularity, but a border between where light can escape, and where it cannot. The event horizon's area and shape are defined by the singulari
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Heavy elements are created by fusion inside of stars and also supernovae (which also frequently, but not always result in black holes). As far as I know, no black hole has ever exploded as nothing escapes from a black hole, and an explosion would seem to put the lie to that.
As far as creating a new universe from a singularity, we may never know. There is some speculation on that, but we're unlikely to ever be able to see that due to the impenetrability of the event horizon.
That said, our observations are
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I read the summary while imagining it being spoken by the voice of the computer attached to his chair that we are all familiar with. I then figured his cringed expression and eye movement were a desperate plea for help but that no one was bothering to verify his eyes were pointing to the same letters the computer was speaking. For all we know he has been trying to warn us that Skynet became active during the Reagan administration.
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