Slashdot Mirror
Black Holes No More -- Introducing the Gravastar
Mark Eymer observes: "From the Space.com article: 'Emil Mottola of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and Pawel Mazur of the University of South Carolina suggest that instead of a star collapsing into a pinpoint of space with virtually infinite gravity, its matter is transformed into a spherical void surrounded by "an extremely durable form of matter never before experienced on Earth."' While these objects may abound in the universe, they also say that our entire universe may reside within a giant gravastar." This new theory attempts to fill holes in the currently accepted concept of the "black hole".
our entire universe may reside within a giant gravastar.
If this appear to be true, I then guess we could find universes in atomic particles.
Smile, don't click...
True, but a lot of people thought Einstein and Newton were crazy too, and they didn't exactly have many peers at first to verify and critique their information, as they were just cast off as silly just as you've done.
Everyone's gotta take chances, and just because they don't have a long dignified history of work doesn't mean their words are invalid from the get-go.
I never did research to investigate the black hole theories, nor will I do research on this. I'll leave that to others. But new ideas tend to be a positive thing, even if they may seem outlandish at first. And what's with this "self-professed scientists" title? It's not as if "credible leaders" in a field haven't been wrong before. I look forward to others looking into this. When Slashdot posts about an article that hasn't been peer-reviewed because it's new, someone complains because it's too new? geesh. I'm sure we have some knowledge members among the Slashdot audience that can tell us more. Maybe Slashdot posting the article brings it to their attention and peer-review will occur sooner. Maybe it's not worth reviewing. We'll see.
In times like these, it is helpful to remember that there have always been times like these. - Paul Harvey
Someone luckily stashed a PDF of this (Copyright 1999 The Onion).
There you go.
Which would mean the universe is already *in* /dev/null.
I have no problems believing that.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
You can't conceive of "zillions of states hiding in a black hole" but you can facily throw us the concept of an infinite universe ruled by an infinite mystical entity not of that universe but having a one-to-one correspondence with that universe? I think I'll nominate you for the Miles Hayes Award for explaining the simple in terms of the complex.
Personally, I suspect that what we're looking at is the conservation of information--the indestructable info-quantum.
Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus.
Singularities are where the math stops working. There is no reason to believe they have any reality. Gravitational singularities can't exist because they rely on infinite compression, which is impossible because of quantum mechanics.
Let me just say that every 4 months or so somebody writes a paper that tries to explain black holes as something other than black holes. Some of these papers are good, and some are not, but the fact remains that there are people out there who just don't like the idea of black holes and try to come up with other explainations.
Usually these explanations are far more complex physically than a black hole, so until I see a compelling, scientifically verifiably alternative to the theory of black holes I'll apply the principal of Occams Razor. I.e. The simplest answer is most likely the correct one. Theories that are 30 times more complex than black holes but are not measurably different I'll continue to ignore.
This is somthing I wrote a while back: I call it the Imploding Universe. So, a sigularity is where all the formulas blow up ... right ? The IMPLODING hypothesis goes a bit like this; all matter in the black hole becomes a single point in which the space/time fabric is re-ignited in a whole new universe.
So what appears to be an expanding universe is really a remnant effect of the imploding nature. The reason the universe appears to be expanding is because matter is uniformly shrinking and space is expanding to take it's place. The quantum mechanics is explained as a rebirth of the matter.
The "dark energy" observation may well be effects of implosion. ...
Since then, string theory talks about 'Brane's. So it is quite concievable that "our" universe is within one of these "Branes" and that the "seeping of matter into the brane happens when a "tear" in the current brane is formed from the extreme acitivity of gravitons (since the hypothesis is that gravitons pass through branes while EM and Nuclear forces do not.
This is really spooky.
Yep, thats MY theory. You have to admit it's cute. Universe's popping up all over the place ...
Heh. Neverminding that the physics archive isn't peer reviewed and me the junior in a physics program could post my papers on artificial gravity and flying saucers there, one has to still step back and say 1) Other people have already pointed out enough that there are papers by the authors all over the place, and 2) Los Alamos National Laboratory tends to be a step above your average community college: people who are there get there because they tend to know what they're doing. When one of them suggests a completely different theory, maybe a brainless shmuck who never got past Newtonian Mechanics shouldn't be pulling out crap comparing them to creation-scientists or posts about the Bermuda triangle. Drugs are bad.
The peer review starts now and ends when someone either proves black holes or disproves this theory. Right now the 'official' story is also in process. Belief is a wonderful and transient thing. The things that people believed 50 years ago are not exactly the same as the things that most people believe in today. This is true in both our daily lives and the sciences. Go back 100 years and you'll see that our predecesors were mostly wrong about a lot of things.
As far as this theory is concerned, I have some doubts but I am willing to hear them through. As for Black Holes, I have some long standing concerns which have never been sufficiently answered. The inner workings of a Black Hole, like time before the Big Bang, is currently unknowable. They are still only theories and should be labeled 'under consideration'.
But don't take my word for it. Believe anything you want to believe. Doesn't make it so or you smart or this new theory stupid.
True, but for every Einstein there are a number of individuals who actually are crazy and whose theories actually are asinine. There is a reason that papers are peer reviewed.
The parent's reasoning is flawed, and probably a troll, but here goes:
I know several idiots with college degrees.
The same skills that make one a brilliant theorist, artisan, thinker, etc. are not necessarily the ones that help you complete a degree program.
They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
-- Carl Sagan
IANAP... are you?
If not, then how do you know that one theory or the other can't be proven, or atleast supported, by mathematics? Perhaps through investigating these, scientists could find that point-like black holes are in fact mathematically impossible.
Science is to the point where we think about lots of things that can't be observed. You're right that if something can't be observed, then it doesn't directly matter to us. But thinking about such things can benefit us by leading us to more accurate models of the universe, and to conclusions which can be observed and useful.
So, since you sound like you know what you're talking about, how does this theory solve the problem that it is purported to, i.e. where does the entropy go? Is the theory that objects with entopy that enter the event space increase the entropy inside the gravastar?
Milo
True, but a lot of people thought Einstein and Newton were crazy too, and they didn't exactly have many peers at first to verify and critique their information, as they were just cast off as silly just as you've done.
The difference here is that Einstein and Newton both were faced with observations that contradicted the best theories at the time. Now there's a good starting point for a new theory. As for gravastars, there's no need to find an alternative for black holes until we have observations that contradict our present theories about them. So far, there are none -- the points about entropy remain moot, as they can be explained in precisely the same way in black hole theory as with gravastars: behind a black hole there very well could be another world.
This leads to the corollary that this world is the nether side of some black hole -- which is equivalent to what the gravastar researchers conclude within their framework. The problem for the gravastar theory is the infamous Occam's Razor. Their theory is more complicated than the black hole theory it is trying to replace, and unnecessarily so because it does not bring about any new explanations. Just a word play on the old stuff, basically.
Sure, it's fun to play the game of 'what if', and little harm can come of it, and there's always a possibility that one ends up with something that is actually better than the best existing theory. It's good for raising research funds. As a method for advancing knowledge it's no better than filling a room with typewriters and monkeys.
Regardless of whether black holes exist, and regardless of whether gravastars exist, the black hole entropy problem still needs to be solved in theory, because theory admits black hole solutions, and needs to be able to account for the thermodynamics of any solution. Theorists don't study black hole entropy because it's astrophysically relevant or measured in expeirments that need to be accounted for; they study it because they want to understand all mathematical aspects of the theory, aspects which are present whether or not they are realized in nature. So gravastars do absolutely nothing to resolve "troubling issues" with black hole theory.
Besides, I wouldn't say that physicists have largely failed to account for the huge entropy of black holes. Circa 1995, both string theorists and loop quantum gravity researchers were able to take a large step towards deriving the Hawking-Bekenstein entropy formula.
It seems to me that this theory is a very complex way of explaining away a very simple theory. I'll reserve judgement though until we can get some hard data from the near vicinity of a black hole/gravastar.
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
However, research into conecpts that turn out to be wrong or seemingly useless can be valid and useful, provided the hypothesis is founded in some modicum of real scientific observation. Even if the hypothesis turns out to be bunk, the observation is still valid, and the question is still valid. Therefore, the reserach that was done simply demonstrated what was incorrect. We can apply some of the lessons learned during that misguided research to what comes later on. We now know what doesn't adequately explain what is observed.
There's a quote from Edison, something along the lines of "Trying to create a lightbulb, there were not 100 failures. I found 100 ways to make a nonfunctioning lightbulb."
There is a reason for everything. Sometimes that reason just sucks.
Newton Ate Mercury (Score:5, Funny)
Another typical example when a true statement is considered as funny by people unaware of its truthfulness.
The purpose of life is to find the purpose of life.