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Black Holes 'Do Not Exist,' Contends Physicist
SpaceAdmiral writes "Nature reports that, according to a physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, 'It's a near certainty that black holes don't exist.' George Chapline argues that the collapse of massive stars is more likely to lead to dark energy stars. These dark energy stars behave somewhat like a black hole outside of the surface, but the negative gravity inside could cause matter to 'bounce back out again.'"
Here is his actual article (PDF).
Theres always someone who has a diferent theory.
On the other hand though...
Tell someone there are a million stars in the sky and they'll believe you...
Tell them paint is wet and...
http://www.sandstorming.com
I contend that ass holes don't exist!
Oh yeah? Proof by contradiction; you.
I've been fooled by Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock all these years. DOH!
You mean they told you that they loved you, but it turned out they were just using you for sex?
You know MC Hawking isn't going to stand for this shit.
In other news, donuts almost certainly don't exist. Instead it is much more likely that there exists circular pieces of cooked dough with a hole in the centre.
Crackpottery would be saying something is true and then saying everything must conform to that. Science doesn't work like that. You have a bunch of data, and you make a theory that best fits the evidence. Or you make a theory that makes some prediction. That theory remains valid until some piece of data is uncovered that does not fit in with the theory, at which point the theory is modified.
Right now, black holes are what seem to fit observations and theory. If we get more data (perhaps what this article is referring to) that does not conform, then the theory will change with it.
Thats not crackpottery, thats the way its supposed to work. There is no such thing as a 'final' theory. Its a process.
What did they do?: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/1 7/1541230&from=rss
>Linux is not user-friendly.
It _is_ user-friendly. It is not ignorant-friendly and idiot-friendly.
If you can read this sig - the bitch fell off.
Preach it brother! And add to that list time dialation, length dialation, non simultaneity, spontaneous quantum particle creation, particle smearing, the particle-wave duality, 2-slit experiments, splitting atoms, bowling balls and feathers falling at the same speeds, and the earth being round. Crackpottery, all.
Geez, just because you don't understand it doesn't make it wrong. Weirder stuff has already been proven.
The ______ Agenda
You going to tell me that Terra isn't flat? That the humours don't control disease? That there are no dragons off the edge of the map? Puh-leeze.
This is why I make it a point to never listen to scientists. They change their minds too often. You'd think women would dominate science, considering their natural talents in that area.
http://xkcd.com/386/
There is an enormous amount of work that makes Quantum Mechanics play well with relativity.
The problem with quantum mechanics and relativity is that the theory of quantum mechanics only works well when gravity is so weak that it can be neglected. Particle theory only works when we pretend gravity doesn't exist. On the other hand, general relativity only works when we pretend that the Universe is purely classical and that quantum mechanics is not needed in our description of nature.
The solution is string theory. This website has a nice list of expirements that have been done in favor of string theory.
What is "true science?". Science is a process, not a result. Things that turned out to be wrong, like phlogiston or ether, aren't necessarily bad science, they are still part of the process.
They were disproved, and lead to better (as in having more accurate predictive power) theories. Black Holes are extrapolations of existing theories that seem good (like General Relativity), so they shouldn't be dismissed unless we can disprove them or come up with a better theory.
That, after all, is science.
Who modded this insightful? Probably someone who's never been to a conference...
Take a look at the header - this was submitted to a conference, *not* a full peer-reviewed journal. Many conferences (I know for sure most IEEE conferences are like this) limit paper submissions to 4 pages. URSI (Union Radio-Scientifique Internationale - they're just like IEEE Antennas and Propigation Society, with mostly the same members and co-host their conference) papers are even limited to 1 page for their conference. *Conference* papers really more discussion points than full blown "proofs". I'd suspect he'd follow this up with an "official" paper in one of their peer-reviewed journals.
That's what they wanted you to think :P
They created something that behaves like a black hole. If the theory about dark energy stars is right, it could have been a ball of dark energy instead.
IAAP (I am a physicist), and I'm annoyed that this is modded "Informative".
The RHIC collaboration at Brookhaven has fewer pion jets than their complicated Monte Carlo simulations say should exist. One possible (and highly attention-getting) explanation is analogous to a black hole, in the same way that "slow light" experiments can create something analogous to an event horizon. Neither experiment is actually creating a black hole , in the sense of a quantity of matter compressed to a region smaller than its Schwarzchild radius.
Regarding the original article, it's interesting speculation, but without any evidence to support it yet. For those interested in some of its underlying ideas (e.g. the vacuum as a superfluid), I strongly recommend Bob Laughlin's new popular book (readable by nonphysicists!) on the subject, A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down.
No. An object does not have to reach escape velocity to escape a planet's gravitational pull. Escape velocity is the speed with which a ballistic (unpowered) object has to be launched from the surface of the planet in order to escape its gravitational field. You calculate it by setting the initial kinetic energy (given by (mv^2)/2, a half the mass times the square of the veloicty) equal to the gravitational potential energy (given by GM/r^2, where G is the gravitational constant, M the mass of the planet, and r^2 the square of the radius of the planet).
That gives a figure for the escape velocity of
v = sqrt(2GM/m(r*r))
However, for a rocket (or other powered device) to escape a planet's gravitational pull, as the GP said, all it has to do is provide enough vertical thrust to provide a positive acceleration. That acceleration does not have to accelerate it to the escape velocity - in fact, you could adjust it to compensate for the falling gravitational pull and so maintain a constant velocity of whatever you want, and (if you have sufficient power/fuel) you'll still escape.
That doesn't work for a black hole because all of that is based on Newtonian mechanics, which do not apply in the large gravitational fields close to the event horizon. There, you must use General Relativity, which is counter to our everyday common sense view of the world (precisely because on our scales, it's irrelevant). I don't know enough about GR to demonstrate why this is, however.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Whenever, over the ages, science seems to get too complicated, the usual answer is that it has gone off in a tangent. Most of the best theories have been elegantly simple at explaining our observations. These "discoveries" when proposed were considered revolutionary ideas. Later, when they were developed they usually were over-complicated by trying to explain everything. That's when a revolution in simplification happened and the process began from nearly scratch. Think of what happened to Keplerians' formulas and Newton's idea of gravity. They are still used today, even though they are wrong, and have been supplanted by Einstein's Theory of Gravity, because the models of Newton & Kepler are very accurate. Better yet: look at the models offered by geo-centric solar system projections. Here is one really nice animation: http://catholicoutlook.com/images/movingsolar7.gif
The idea is that once it gets too complicated all of the evolutionary ideas that get developed are probably causing more harm to the original thesis. Although the original work did a great job of explaining a certain observation when new data was added the theory had to expanded to a level of undue complexity to have weight. Then a competing and revolutionary idea was developed, seemed to match the data, and the process began anew.
I guess it's getting time for a powerful new theory. One that will get ruined in the future, since we really know so little.
They mention being cault up in a black hole in "Tomorrow is Yesterday". Its the first time they use the sling-shot time travel method.
Warping away from the black hole caused the Enterprise to pass beyond Warp 10, which evidently caused it to go back in time (though passing Warp 10 sometimes doesn't). They wind up on earth in the 1960's and have some dealings with the USAF.
I don't think it was the fist time they did the time warp, there was also an early episode where it occured because the had to "hard start" the warp drive.
Cool art gallery, if you're into that sort of thing.
What has that got to do with a black h-- oh. Oh god.
Actually "Tomorrow is Yesterday" mentions a "black star" not a "black hole". "Tommorow is Yeserday" was first aired in Jan 1967 and AFAIK produced in 1966. As previously mentioned, John Wheeler coined "black hole" in late 1967. So it predates the existance of the term "black hole" by a small but important amount.