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Space Science

Black Holes May Hide a Mind-Bending Secret About Our Universe (msn.com) 136

"For the last century the biggest bar fight in science has been between Albert Einstein and himself," reports the New York Times: On one side is the Einstein who in 1915 conceived general relativity, which describes gravity as the warping of space-time by matter and energy. That theory predicted that space-time could bend, expand, rip, quiver like a bowl of Jell-O and disappear into those bottomless pits of nothingness known as black holes. On the other side is the Einstein who, starting in 1905, laid the foundation for quantum mechanics, the nonintuitive rules that inject randomness into the world — rules that Einstein never accepted. According to quantum mechanics, a subatomic particle like an electron can be anywhere and everywhere at once, and a cat can be both alive and dead until it is observed. God doesn't play dice, Einstein often complained.

Gravity rules outer space, shaping galaxies and indeed the whole universe, whereas quantum mechanics rules inner space, the arena of atoms and elementary particles. The two realms long seemed to have nothing to do with each other; this left scientists ill-equipped to understand what happens in an extreme situation like a black hole or the beginning of the universe.

But a blizzard of research in the last decade on the inner lives of black holes has revealed unexpected connections between the two views of the cosmos. The implications are mind-bending, including the possibility that our three-dimensional universe — and we ourselves — may be holograms, like the ghostly anti-counterfeiting images that appear on some credit cards and drivers licenses. In this version of the cosmos, there is no difference between here and there, cause and effect, inside and outside or perhaps even then and now; household cats can be conjured in empty space. We can all be Dr. Strange.

"It may be too strong to say that gravity and quantum mechanics are exactly the same thing," Leonard Susskind of Stanford University wrote in a paper in 2017. "But those of us who are paying attention may already sense that the two are inseparable, and that neither makes sense without the other."

That insight, Dr. Susskind and his colleagues hope, could lead to a theory that combines gravity and quantum mechanics — quantum gravity — and perhaps explains how the universe began.

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Black Holes May Hide a Mind-Bending Secret About Our Universe

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  • by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Sunday October 16, 2022 @02:49AM (#62970499)

    Just in case you needed more proof that he sucks at being a dungeon master.

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Well, he does achieve an impressive level of death, pain and suffering. So if you are into those things....
      May explain why so many "leaders" are.

      • Yeah, that guy plays favorites, just read his manual. Whoever sucks up to him the most gets all the goodies.

        • ..and not even that. Plenty of "Job"s who get shat on all their lives with no reward at the end while the bad guys die happy in old age with big bags of money.

            It's like the ancient version of a Disney movie (but more foul and gruesome), happily ever after, fairytale shit. Except the real world is nothing like a fairytale. The bad guys often win, the gazelle gets torn apart alive by the lion feeling extreme and unimaginable pain while it happens. The world is cruel and unfair THE END.

    • by Roger W Moore ( 538166 ) on Sunday October 16, 2022 @07:48AM (#62970883) Journal

      According to quantum mechanics, a subatomic particle like an electron can be anywhere and everywhere at once, and a cat can be both alive and dead until it is observed.

      That's literally NOT what Quantum Mechanics says. Schrodinger's cat was a thought experiment to show that the Copenhagen interpretation of QM was wrong. Nobody believes that cats can be both alive and dead at the same time - that was literally Schrodinger's entire point. As for a particle being "anywhere and everywhere" at once that's utter crap as well. Under QM particles' have probability distributions and these definitely can and do have zeroes in them.

      I don't know about God playing dice but this journalist seems to be playing with psychedelics.

      • by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Sunday October 16, 2022 @08:39AM (#62970969)

        If you think a cat can't be simultanously alive and dead, you probably don't own a cat. Cats are dead when they don't want to move but as soon as a can opener whirrs they most certainly are alive.

      • by nasch ( 598556 )

        Under QM particles' have probability distributions and these definitely can and do have zeroes in them.

        Zero probability doesn't mean something is impossible.

      • The summary is complete drivel. I didn't bother to read the article because of this.

        This author is clearly not writing to an audience of people who are educated in the basics of physics. The target audience here is that set of people who have no interest in it nor patience for it, and hence little understanding of it, and are easily dazzled by provocative imagery. Statements like "In this version of the cosmos, there is no difference between here and there, cause and effect, inside and outside or perhaps

        • The summary is complete drivel. I didn't bother to read the article because of this.

          And none of this is new. They've been kicking these ideas around since the 70s.

      • Schroedinger's cat experiment is a thought experiment. It does not show that particular theory is right or wrong but rather that there are different interpretations of QM. If the fate of the cat and the observation of his fate are two different independent events then trying to entangle them is wrong. Of course, if we (or the God) modify the experiment and wire the charge to the door with some probability that will go off if opened, this creates the entirely different model of the universe.

        And, no, hous
      • My wife bought a magnetic sign for the dishwasher that you can slide between Clean and Dirty. The first thing I did was slide it half way between the two and pronounce it to be Schrodinger’s Dishwasher since it was both clean and dirty at the same time. She didn’t get it.

        • Before we had a proper window into the tracking room at the studio, there was a sign that hung on one of the sound proofing doors that said "Schrodinger's Recording Studio."

          The only way to tell if we were tracking was to open the door, and possibly ruin a good take.

          We are somewhat more professional now.

      • I agree and offer this extension of your thoughts:

        When scientists spot holes in a theory, they often provide paradoxes that surface as a result of that theory.

        Schrödinger presented such regarding the Copenhagen proposal in the format of, "if this then that."

        One of the obvious faults with Schrödinger's Cat is that all of the components in the experiment are Classical, not Quantum. Cats, boxes, vials, radioactive elements, and levers, are not quantum particles.

        A very unfortunate result of Schrö

      • by wrf3 ( 314267 )

        There's nothing wrong with Copenhagen. Don't confuse ontology (what the cat is) with epistemology (what we can say about the cat). The cat is alive or dead. But until we know that by observation, we can only say that the cat is dead with some probability and alive with some probability. And that's all we can say about the future - because the future does not physically exist.

        • we can only say that the cat is dead with some probability and alive with some probability

          Yeah, either or. Binary condition.

        • There's nothing wrong with Copenhagen.

          Yes, there is because Copenhagen says that the cat is in a superposition of both alive and dead states until the box is opened which is clearly nonsense, that was Schrodinger's point.

          And that's all we can say about the future - because the future does not physically exist.

          But this is not about the future - the cat is in the box in the present the only thing that opening the box does is let you know the current state. That's the key problem with Copenhagen - the "collapse of the wave function" at some fixed point in time when you take the measurement and that's why we really only teach it as a

          • by wrf3 ( 314267 )

            Whether or not something is "clearly nonsense" depends on your intuitions about the way nature works. As Feynman is quick to point out, quantum mechanics doesn't respect our intuitions. Until you experience/observe/measure the cat in the box, it's state is future to you and doesn't exist until then (cf. Mermin's, "Is the moon there when nobody looks? Reality and the quantum theory").

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      As far as what any of the major religions consider God, He is the most prolific dice roller of all time.

      He put in motion a system whereby new organisms come to life via the coming together of 2 sets of instructions, which are then copied billions of times with what appears to be no error checking and correcting. Entirely best effort. There are almost always mistakes, some meaningless but some leading to things like a virus that previously infected non-humans being able to infect humans. He had to know thi
  • ...but in all seriousness, if you can't imagine how "gravity and quantum mechanics" can possibly be the same thing, start reading here [wikipedia.org].

    Not to say that's necessarily the way to go, but it does give new directions. Essentially, what we could never reconcile -- and still can't -- is the "spooky action at distance" of quantum entanglement / teleportation. Regardless of whether we can actually can use it for superluminal transfer of useful information, or whether General Relativity found a loophole again by requ

    • "They're the most complicated puzzles physics has to offer right now, so... it is painstakingly clear that Black Holes and Entangled Particles just have to have the same underlying cause, right? Right?! There's no way in Hell that there could actually be two fundamental mechanisms about physics we don't have any clue about, right? ;-)"

      That comment rings a bell. About 1900 there was a consensus that Physics was solved. There were only two things not understood, the results of the Michaelson-Morely experiment

    • As I understand quantum entanglement, if we have entangled photons and I measure the the polarization of mine, I've collapsed the wave function (whatever that actually means) of my photon, and I have some information (not complete) about how your measurement will go. If you measure your polarization with an apparatus tilted relative to mine, I still don't know what your measurement can be; all I can do is figure probabilities. Is the wave function really collapsed then?

      The classical analogy that I keep

      • Is the wave function really collapsed then?

        Without going too much into details: yes, it really is, according to our understanding.

        This is difficult to understand from entanglement alone, you need to look at quantum teleportation for that. Essentially, teleportation involves two entanglement processes of 3 particles: A, B and X. The latter (X) here is the one with an unknown quantum state that we wish to "teleport" without destroying.

        What we do is prepare two entangled particles A and B. One needs to stay "here" and the other needs to get to the dest

        • (search for Bell Inequations)

          Sorry, that was BS. It's Bell's theorem [wikipedia.org] instead.

        • Right - local hidden variable theories are wrong. The analogy shows that suddenly knowing the outcome of an event a spacewise interval away is not necessarily FTL communication. Thanks for the explication, by the way. I hadn't understood that about quantum teleportation before. However, I don't understand the word "instantaneously" in physics, and haven't since I studied Special Relativity.

  • by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Sunday October 16, 2022 @03:42AM (#62970545)

    Einstein had one position on the matter. Other people ultimately deserve credit for quantum theory. It would be more accurate to say the bar fight was between Einstein and Plank. Heck TFS itself says Einstein is in a fight with himself and then proceeds to give a theory by Einstein followed by on by Heisenberg and one by Schrödinger.

    Laying the foundation for quantum mechanics is not the development of quantum mechanics anymore than building a CNC milling machine makes you the creator of the automobile engine.

    • by shoor ( 33382 ) on Sunday October 16, 2022 @04:36AM (#62970619)

      I don't think it's fair to say the fight was with Max Planck. (I'm only a layman, but I'll dive in here anyway) Planck determined mathematically that the characteristics of black body radiation could be explained if the wavelength of light varied by a discrete number of steps of a particular value that became known as Planck's Constant, rather than being determined by a continuous function as found in classic analytical calculus. A photon of light contained some number of these steps which he called quanta. (See the ultra-violet catastrophe for how this was confounding physicists at the time.) Einstein explained the photoelectric effect using Planck's idea and got the Nobel Prize for it. (Not for any the Special or the General Theory of Relativity.) The person Einstein was really at loggerheads with was Neils Bohr. Supposedly, when Einstein said, "God does not play dice", Bohr replied, "Stop telling God what to do."

      The big deal revolved around the Einstein Podolsky Rosen Paradox (often abbreviated to EPR paradox.) A physicist name John Stewart Bell proposed Bell's Theorem to resolve the paradox. It took awhile for the technology to develop to at least partially test Bell's Theorem and the recent Nobel Prize Winners in Physics actually made their bones to some extent on testing it. Bohr seems to be winning the debate about the paradox but one out is Superdeterminism that hasn't been completely eliminated as a possibility yet, so far as I know.

      My take is that, if Superdeterminism is true, then the universe is kind of like a Life Program. At the very start everything is determined, but the only way to know what exactly is determined, is to play the game. There's no Apollo like god of prophesy who can look ahead and tell you what it's going to be before it is played. The future is determined, just like the past. The difference is the future is also unknown. So, you don't have free will because everything is determined, but, if you did have free will, I for one can't figure out how you'd know the difference.

      • My take is that, if Superdeterminism is true, then the universe is kind of like a Life Program. At the very start everything is determined, but the only way to know what exactly is determined, is to play the game.

        The problem I have with this is that we really have to bend over backwards to construct a flavor of "determinism" that fits with the Bell inequations.

        I like the Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics a lot better :-) Essentially it says that quantum mechanics goes not only forward, but also backwards in time, and interactions between quantum-mechanical systems are "transactions" between time-symmetric waves. I like this particularly because (1) it solves a number of intuition problems we have wit

      • I also think determinism is the most likely solution. You have to have a chuckle reading the reasoning of quite a few scientists that it can't be taken seriously because then they'd have no free will, which is unpalatable. I guess in my universe they didn't have the free will to believe in the absence of free will.
      • "I'm only a layman..." then "Planck determined mathematically...". LOL only on slashdot.
      • >> At the very start everything is determined, but the only way to know what exactly is determined, is to play the game.

        A tad oversimplified, although words break down when talking about this stuff.

        A more accurate way to say it is that the Universe built in the capacity to surprise itself. Crude matter-constructs can produce art, for instance, using the raw materials of supernova explosions, twigs, and animal hairs. The art is surprisingly good! ;)

        You do have free will, in that you have the raw powe

  • by Kokuyo ( 549451 ) on Sunday October 16, 2022 @03:51AM (#62970551) Journal

    I consider myself smarter than the average bear but seriously, there are some topics I just can't wrap my mind around. Quantum mechanics is their king.

    • Re:what? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Snard ( 61584 ) <mike.shawaluk@gma[ ]com ['il.' in gap]> on Sunday October 16, 2022 @04:43AM (#62970629) Homepage
      “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.” - Richard Feynman
      • âoeI think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.â - Richard Feynman

        I gave up on trying to understand quantum mechanics back during the flap over magnetic monopoles. Apparently someone had computed that, if they existed and a composite particle was formed that contained both an electric charge and a magnetic monopole, it would have an extra half-unit of spin compared to the sum of the spins of its components.

        This was explained as the a quantum mechanical manifestation of Farr

    • by splutty ( 43475 )

      Grasping the concept isn't too hard. Understanding it however? Yeah.. No..

    • by quenda ( 644621 )

      I consider myself smarter than the average bear but seriously, there are some topics I just can't wrap my mind around. Quantum mechanics is their king.

      Nobody "gets their head around" QM. The best you can do is understand the maths, and see that QM works.
      Of course the maths is really hard, and even if you are in the top 1% aptitude very few get that far.

      • Re:what? (Score:4, Informative)

        by Dorianny ( 1847922 ) on Sunday October 16, 2022 @05:53AM (#62970723) Journal
        Trying to solve the equation for a physical system is hard a simple understanding of the equations is not all that difficult. Sean Caroll just released a new book doing just that, assuming nothing more then a understanding of High School level Algebra. https://www.amazon.com/Biggest... [amazon.com]
      • Re:what? (Score:5, Funny)

        by keithdowsett ( 260998 ) on Sunday October 16, 2022 @07:03AM (#62970819) Homepage

        As an undergrad I crammed for a Quantum Phenomena exam and managed to pass it many years ago. Then promptly forgot everything except the general principles. So I can explain in general terms why the energy levels of an electron around an atom are quantised, and how this relates to the workings of a fluorescent light (it's actually a good example of quantisation in both gas discharge and solid state fluorescence). But I have the same chance of explaining the time independent Shrodinger wave equation as my neighbour's cat does.

        So I'd rephrase Feynman's quote as, "Nobody outside of an asylum has managed to internalise the quantum mechanical view of the universe".

         

  • by kvutza ( 893474 ) on Sunday October 16, 2022 @04:44AM (#62970633)

    Discussions on that by people who know something is within comments on a blogpost by P. W., following a comment [columbia.edu] there.

    TLDR: It is about toy models that (so far) do not describe this universe.

  • by Viol8 ( 599362 ) on Sunday October 16, 2022 @05:19AM (#62970683) Homepage

    Is fairly obvious from quantum entanglement that the speed of light is not the last word in transmitting state information. Clearly there is some shortcut that the wiring under the board allows. Perhaps like a computer simulation - the developers analogy of choice - a max speed exists in the simulation but the code itself can do what it damn well likes. Quantum mechanics could simply be a manifestation of that - ie it doesnt have to follow the rules that everything else does because operates outside the normal parameters of the universe we're in.

    • Is fairly obvious from quantum entanglement that the speed of light is not the last word in transmitting state information.

      Not everything that seems "fairly obvious" is true. Perhaps the dodge here is what you intend to mean by "state information" since there is no evidence or theoretical basis to believe quantum entanglement can transmit information (completely unqualified) faster than light. The fact that since you can make a measurement of an entangled particle and get a (random) result then you instantly know the state of the distant entangled one does not imply that anything at all was transmitted between them.

      The existenc

      • What you say about entanglement would be true if a state of one particle eg spin, didnt change after its entangled twin had detached. The fact is its state can change and this state change can be seen in the other particle.

      • More like, if special relativity holds, FTL and time travel are the same thing. If you're unwilling to allow time travel, then, yes, FTL and special relativity are incompatible. If special relativity holds, there is no preferred frame of reference, and FTL in multiple frames of reference can go backwards into time. Clearly, time travel implies FTL, since we can send a package to Alpha C in a way that takes a thousand years, and have it hop back nine hundred and ninety-nine.

        This applies to anything FTL

        • Relativity holds for travel through space. It says nothing about any possible short cuts such as wormholes or even deeper into the wiring of the universe. Relativity assumes spacetime is the lowest level of reality. This is an article of faith, not proven fact.

          • This is an article of faith, not proven fact.

            Kinda like wormholes and deeper wiring?

            • by Viol8 ( 599362 )

              You've heard of the word "postulate" I assume? Point is relativtiy and quantum mechanics don't mix. You can either put your fingers in your ears going "la la la I can't hear you" or you can look for the reasons why. A reason might be the relativity isn't the last word.

      • The existence of Special Relativity and the extreme precision to which its accuracy has been confirmed directly indicate that information cannot travel faster than light since SR can be derived based on that one assumption. It information can travel faster than light SR would not be true, but since it is, you can't.

        As I understood it, SR comes from the pair of assumptions that:
        - There is no preferred "at rest" inertial frame of reference. Any constant velocity (less than the speed of light) is as "

  • ER = EPR
  • As I was reading I felt it coming, then at "The Soup-Can Universe" an big whoosh, the explosion :)
  • Purely mathematical speculation.
  • So we are all living in the Matrix?
  • Science article for junior high students.

  • Scientific method will give us the facts in the matter. Philosophically, I think its a great line of thought. Let's postulate some theories and design experiments from these mental exercises.

    I once heard somewhere that time was a precipitate of gravity. Like gravity waves were a weather front moving through space, squeezing time from the space fabric. Fanciful and perhaps fallacious, but a neat mental image.
  • There have been roughly 8000 to 12000 gods, so far, throughout recorded history. What about black transvestite Jesus, with pierced nipples? No? Are you sure?

  • This theory is kinddr suss
  • The TFS sounds like a thick batch of brain broth, the kind crazy and unemployable people come up with.

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