Slashdot Mirror
Possible Hole in Black Holes
jd writes "Researchers have found what they believe may be a MECO (Magnetic, Eternally Collapsing Object) inside of a quasar. MECOs are rivals to black hole theory and involve plasmas that never reach the state of being a singularity. The most obvious differences between them are that MECOs have a magnetic field and do not have an event horizon. The problem lies in that the Universe cannot have both MECOs and black holes — it can only have one or the other. If this object truly is a MECO, then black holes do not exist. Anywhere. (Furthermore, this would require Professor Hawking to return a year's subscription to Private Eye and give Professor Thorne a year's subscription to Penthouse.) On the other hand, if this thing isn't a MECO, it's behaving very very oddly for a black hole."
*Too complicated to coment*
Why can't the MECOs and the black holes just set aside their differences and peacefully coexist?
Seriously, if this thing really is an MECO then what are all of the things that we've thought were black holes?
IANA*
...both MECOs and Black Holes can exist, and it transpires that we actually know a LOT less than we thought we did
Karma: Bad. (As in Good?)
From the article:
"But Chris Reynolds of the University of Maryland, in Baltimore, US, says the evidence for a MECO inside this quasar is not convincing."
Apparently the experts are not conviced about this "interesting" observation but at slashdot the expert will come to a final conclusion. How many slashdot posters actualy are qualified to talk about these subjects?
200GB/2TB $7.95 Coupon: SAVE90DOLLAR
I never thought it would happen to me, a regular guy attending a small midwestern college...but the other night I was sitting at home playing UT and this MECO
I know that there are cases where black holes have been indirectly observed by their effects on neighboring objects and light. Could these same data that were used to indirectly observe the black hole be adequately explained by the presence of whatever this other hypothetical object is?
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
I was reading it fine until I hit the word "Penthouse", then I forgot everything else and had to look it up:
1 4/2330221
n g_an_old_bet
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/07/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Hawking#Losi
Finally! Now that movie Contact doesn't have any scientific merit! (Like it did before...)
"Every time a bell rings, a Dell laptop bursts into flame."
Cosmology isn't my field but the data here is incredibly vague. I'm not sure this deserves more than a raised eyebrow and an "Okay...now come up with something a little less tenuous". Interpretation of data is an art in itself and can be wildly skewed by the observer's own opinions - show mw that this hasn't happened here.
Ok, when we have, like, numerous observations of black holes (which, granted, have only been 'seen' indirectly, but which follow the predictions quite good and at least in one instance, have observed it directly enough to rule out anything else then a black hole) and just one observation of a MECO - especially when scientist themselves say it's not totally convincing - then logic dictates that it's more likely the black-hole theory is correct.
;-).
Until further obervations is being done and it is being confirmed it's truelly a MECO (or other MECOs are observed), then we really can't get say anything beyond wild speculation (which is what slashdot is very good at
Most probably, it will turn out to be not a true MECO, but rather an odd variant of a black hole.
If it DOES turn out to be a MECO, then, as theory predicts, there can't be any black holes - so then all our past obsrvations must have been wrong or misinterpreted. And if it turns out we have MECO's AND blak holes...well, then something very, very, very wrong must be going on with our current understanding of the universe and all the theories thusfar.
Which, actually, would be a fantastic thing to science, contrary to what some might believe.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
So if these MECO are for real, then gravitational collapse canot result in a singularity, which is nice, right? Then how about the big bang? Does that need to have been a singularity, or can we continue with this programme of avoiding the nasty things?
Lets not forget that there is another alternative to one or the other theory being right, and that this alternative is far more likely, almost certain in fact.
The option is that neither of these theories are correct or rather neither is entirely correct. Both may still be partially true, and probably both are to a certain extent.
Newton was right on with his theories, yet they were proven to be incorrect, and they are still the first thing a physics student learns today. I find the idea of "if phenomina A exists then phenomina B, that we have also have some evidence for, cannot exist" because when you get right down to it we don't understand our universe we perceive it.
Remember, they had black holes in Star Trek, and as everyone knows it's gospel what they say and write there.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Okay... If this was detected in a quasar, and, as I understand it, quasars are insanely far away, with the implication that what we see of them happened insanely long ago... Is it possible that, as I think I once read here on Slashdot, some cosmological constants may really be variables that shift very slowly as the universe ages, and that MECOs were thus possible then, but no longer are?
Just askin', and my apologies if this is a stoopid question.
-- B.
This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.
The youngest observed quasar are billions of years old, so why can't an universal constant have changed since the beginning of the universe up to the point it would have changed the quasars and MECOs into galaxies and black holes?
Come on! This is slashdot! No-one needs to actually know anything about a subject to comment on it - we don't even read the fucking articles!
instead the matter pulled in is spun for a while then ejected at near lightspeed
What may happen if a planet falls into MECO? There are who knows how many collapsed stars spinning chunks of matter at near lightspeed.
That's bad news for poor planet Earth, but good news for Armageddon's fans.
My city: Barcelona.
To solve this problem, we must look into the future. Put Hawkins on a dozen Star Trek tapes and see if he can get a hint of what's really going on.
Full Tilt
Maybe we should invade its surface, kill its plasma and convert it to black holeness.
If a MECO spits everything that it sucks in back out again at light speed... then, wouldn't it do the same thing with light itself? Making them visible and directly observable rather than having to indirectly detect them through their interactions with objects around them?
Nurse! o/~
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
It is no meco. They just saw a distant flux capacitor in action
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/cheap-bike-for-sale_W0QQitem Z280008083270QQihZ018QQcat#ebayphotohosting
Ohh, you said Blackhole...
Eternally collapsing.... Never reaches the final state .... I think they are talking about Microsoft Vista. Please retag the thread as MS with that cool cyborg morph of BGates as the icon.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Accorfing to Stephen Hawking's Universe series Hawking was the one who bet that Black Holes don't exist (as some kind of insurance, so if they don't exist and all his work is useless, then he at least would get a subscription to a nice magazine) and he then gave the other guy (forgot his name) 1 year subscription to Penthouse, so if this is true and black holes don't exist, he would get the Penthouses back + a 4 year subscription to Private Eye. Why can't they co-exist though? Can't there be a reasionable scientific explanation that would allow both of these to live???
There are two kinds of people - those who are radioactive and those who have already decayed..
Preface: I have a Ph.D. in Astrophysics and my ressearch has to do with computer models of black holes.
This is yet another one of these things where an observational astronomer who just doesn't like black holes comes up with some incredibly complex theory to explain their oberservations so they don't need a black hole to explain them. There is an incredible resistance towards black holes in some parts of the astronomical community. Saying that "A black hole can't do this" when our models of accretion discs arount black holes are still at the state they are in i.e. fixed background metric, many models are only HD not MHD (no magnetic fields in the disc) is just not backed up by the facts.
This reminds me of the whole "we don't need black holes to explain jets" discussion a couple of years back.
Besides I do not se how the existence of Mecos would prevent the existence of black holes in general. We are still using the same Einstein Equations, right?
I think the operand word in the article is "controversial". Occam's Razor is a good rule of thumb.
Disneyfication of anything is usually proof of its impossibility.
Schrödinger would've loved this problem.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Maybe we should invade its surface, kill its plasma and convert it to black holeness.
Maybe we should just ask it how it feels to think that it's a MECO, and no matter what it says, start up a government program designed to empower its sense of communinity with the black holes. Then, if Kofi Annan decides that the arrangement is suitably free of human suffering that no one in Europe will notice, we can assign a series of attractive Hollywood types to set the tone for more research by doing some short publicity pieces that will help all MECOs feel better about ejecting mass, even if it hurts other stellar objects (which isn't their fault, since the laws of physics are really just The Establishment and Hawking is just The Man, running Big Physics from his position of authority-backed, but morally weak institutional power).
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
MECOs are rivals to black hole theory and involve plasmas that never reach the state of being a singularity.
No singularity, but Meco did come out with that that singularly awesome Star Wars and Other Galactic Funk album back in '77. Take that, black holes!
:-)
Hawkins conceded the bet that black holes did NOT exist and gave the Penthouse subscription, so this could force him to reclaim that and claim his prize.
Hawkins called the bet an insurance policy so he would not be empty handed if black holes did not exist after all...
Sig (appended to the end of comments I post, 54 chars)
A friend and I were arguing about this, I was stating that despite all the evidence to the contrary, it was still possible that black holes don't exist and that you can't trust everything that scientists say is true. *Cough* Ozone hole *Cough*
Here is a direct link to a (free) pdf paper describing the idea of a MECO in all the gory details:o n%2Fpdf&identifier=oai%3AarXiv.org%3Aastro-ph%2F06 02453
http://www.citebase.org/fulltext?format=applicati
As a physicist (though not a cosmologist) it looks not at all convincing.
No, no, no, they must be talking about SCO, since nothing Microsoft made ever collapsed, but instead expanded and got bloated to infinity.
They must be our new insect overlords!
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
and we can end this debate quickly. Though it may take them a while to get there. Right?
The problem lies in that the Universe cannot have both MECOs and black holes - it can only have one or the other
So the universe is a hell of a big place. Why can't a MECO on one part of the universe survive with a black hole, in an insanely far part of the universe, reside?
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
Perhaps the mathematical theorists interpreting observed data based on assumptions from past unproven theories should stop their art and get back to the practice of science. Then it is unlikely we would be having this discussion.
If the black hole has an event horizon couldn't be outside our universe in some basement universe or something??
Schrödinger would have loved anything he could stick a cat into. He hated cats. You should have heard him go on about the microwave oven, and the wood chipper.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
If MECOs are proven to exist and thus prove that Black Holes do not exist, then Kip would have to give back the year of Pentohouse that Stephen has already bought for him. And Kip would have to buy four years of Private Eye for Stephen.
Stephen Hawking bet Kip that Black Holes do NOT exist as an insurance policy.
Patrick
The worst part of being athiest.... You don't have anyone to talk to during orgasm!
I'll point out one problem with this that no one else has already, it is in New Scientist. That alone makes it probable pseudoscience. These guys have made a career out of taking one valid data point and building the rest of the line as they see fit. If this is believable, we will see mention in journals in the near future.
Once again scienctists show their prevailing ego's and ignorance. Clearly evident in the above statement supposes that MECOs and Blackholes cannot both exist. Rather than leaving open the possibility that although our understanding says they can't...perhaps there is something we don't know or understand yet.
Science is full of ego...
I have thought for a long time that singularities were impossible due to conservation of angular momentum. Velocity is all relative, so if you have a spinning basketball and squish it down to half it's original circumference, the relative velocity of two opposing points on it's equator will double. Divide the circumference again and the relative velocity will double again. There is a lot of dividing that can be done between any rational number and zero (the theoretical diameter of a singularity), and if you have any spin in the original matter that relative velocity is going to hit the speed of light long before you hit zero.
bend like the reed
The article says at some point that "the internal of the MECO object is so hot that subatomic particles pop in and out of existence".
Does it mean that:
A. the law of thermodynamics is broken? since new particles enter the universe, the amount of energy in the system is not constant.
B. the creation of subatomic particles fits correctly with the big bang model? if the laws of thermodynamics are not broken and the amount of energy in the universe stays as it is, it means that when subatomic particles pop out of existence, they are simply converted to "something else". They do not actually disappear. What is that "something else"?
Read the theories, one can't exist if the other exists.
/. idiot moderator here mistook that as insightful.
This is not a human distinction, it's a mathematical distinction. It's not that the scientists don't like each other, or think the other is dumb, it's just that if you accept black holes, the math doesn't work for MECO's and vice-versa.
The only thing I can think of is you're being funny and the typical
SCIENCE!
Perl, n. A language spoken by Eskimos.
From what I can understand of this article, this would mean the mere existence of a MECO would prove perpetual motion is possible since it will forever "run" without any need for additional resources.
My question in this case would be, what is "powering" this thing in order to maintain a "collapsing" state?
Business \Busi"ness\, n.;
A scam in which all people involved perceive as beneficial...
The Mean Engineers Cranky and Odd live on the west side of town, the black ho's live on the east side.
I have always conjectured that our entire universe is God's equivalent of an 8th grade science project.
The bad news is that he only got a D+!
Might be due to the "parasite infection" on a third planet in a solar system in the Milky Way.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
"Our universe is stranger than we can possibly imagine."
;-)
oh, I dunno about that...
I can conjure up some real weird stuff, especially if I'm using [CENSORED].
I mean, if I imagine the universe is full of pink elephants with blue spots, drowning in a see of talking mushrooms, is the real universe really stranger than that?
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
It's not a MECO it is a star gate in space thay thay are looking into.
It is a hell of a leap to go from seeing a large gap in a ring of dust around a quasar and a glow from the inner edge to saying that all black hole evidence is wrong. To make this leap they'd have to be pretty clear about how debris builds around compact objects, which they aren't. They only made observations in the optical wavelengths (according to the article). Even the fact that they used gravitational lensing in a new way may have skewed their results. Other events may have occured that swept out a gap around the object. Maybe another dense object fell in and swept out a gap before the evidence of it was consumed.
All the comments about "But the universe is weirder than you think" are fine but the universe isn't free of any rules. It is complex but not completely chaotic.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
So given that there is no space, what explains the experiential artifact of space? Our known physical laws all operate in direct relationship to space. If everything follows the same rules and exists in a dimensionless void, what determines the apparent distortion in the way these particles interact? There is *something* different in the way the Earth interacts with the moon versus an asteroid in some other galaxy. Space has proven a useful concept in understanding the universe for some reason, and must be explained by some qualitatively similar property or force in a spaceless framework. For example, if I were to write a program that simulated the gravitational interactions of several bodies, the data would indeed exist in an irrelevant physical space, but I would need to store the values for each object's position and velocity. Does the universe have some type of data register for each particle? How do I conceptualize this?
I'm a little skeptical of their method. TFA mentions that the quasar was lensed by a foreground galaxy and they measured the flickering as individual stars lensed the quasar. It just doesn't work that way. When a galaxy gravitationally lenses a background object, the image will appear as an arc or multiple points around the lensing galaxy. This configuration doesn't allow for flickering due to individual stars because you are using the combined masses of all those stars to do the lensing. Given that a typical galaxy has 100 billion stars, any individual effects are .000000001%, in other words, not measurable.
1 8.pdf
+ 561.html
Reading some more into it, I found the paper:
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/astro-ph/pdf/0505/05055
Lots of math and theory, but no data to be had, which I find suspicious... I did some googling on the quasar Q0957+561 and found several links.
This site, by the author:
http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/~rschild/qgl.html
This goes into how measuring the time delay between the flickering images of the quasar can give an estimate on the age of the universe (correlation between geometric distance and redshift). Also, he seems to have a persecution complex....
Also:
http://www.extrasolar.net/planet.asp?PlanetID=74
Again, the same author suggests a minute fluctuation in one lensed image and not the other is consistent with a microlensing event by a planet in the foreground galaxy. I still don't see how you can say that since the paper in the first link talks about how years of observations and statistical correlations were needed to make the discovery of the MECO. One fluctuation out of many observations is like spitting in the ocean...
This link gives an alternate explanation for the planet microlensing event:
http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/Q/Q0957
And the obligatory Wikipedia article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_Quasar
One thing I noticed is that most of sites I found are either from the author himself or use his papers as the primary source. He also appears to have his fingers in everything from determining the age of the universe (his estimate was 12 billion years as opposed to 13.7 billion, but still pretty good), detecting extrasolar planets, and now debunking black holes. Dr. Schild has done some good work, but I'm skeptical of his recent "discoveries".
Why can't there be both Black Holes and MECOs? I mean, space is big...really really big. We may have had physicists do some uber complex calculations to figure this out, but its only a calculation. Real life often trumps calculations and proves them wrong.
Click Click Bloody Click PANCAKES!
What we need is a UN brokered solution to create an environment such that both MECOs and Black Holes can BOTH peacefully exist together in the universe. They'll have just as much success with this than they do with most of their other resolutions. It will be just as enforceable too.
[/offTopicRant]
Faith is a willingness to accept something w/o complete proof and to act on it. Reason allows you to correct that faith.
Fair enough, donate Hawking's issues of Private Eye to a library or something. Though it might be best for everyone if Professor Thorne keeps his used Penthouse subscription.
I suggest you read Slashdot
"The problem lies in that the Universe cannot have both MECOs and black holes - it can only have one or the other. If this object truly is a MECO, then black holes do not exist." OR - our current theories and understandings are wrong.
Wikipedia stub : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetospheric_eterna lly_collapsing_object
The problem that the grandparent pointed out is very real. While we need to assume that "the state of current knowledge" is sound and trustworthy to do any engineering it is fatal to make that assumption in science.
I had a friend who made a minor discovery while in undergrad, simply because he didn't fudge his data in a lab assignment. He got graded down for it, and decided to redo the experiment. When he got the same results, he started asking around and found out that quite a few of his classmates had also gotten the results he had, but written it off to "experimental error" since it didn't match the predicted outcome. He took this back to the professor, and challenged him to actually do the assignment himself. They wound up publishing a joint paper on it, but to me the most interesting realization was that, for all the years that assignment had been given, nobody else had caught the error in the accepted theory.
By all means, if you have to bet on the outcome of any particular situation, go with the current state of knowledge. But if you're asked if our current knowledge is correct in its entirety, bet heavily that it is not. And if observation doesn't match the theory, don't lock yourself into the assumption that the data must be wrong because the theory couldn't possible be.
--MarkusQ
I've been wondering about that for some number of years now - but the fact that cosmologists have generally accepted the existence of singularities as all but proven fact and have even had many observations which supported this belief has always prevented me from thinking too hard about it (after all, why pit my amateur understanding of cosmology and relativity against that of experts?).
If this assertion proves to be tenable, what effect will it have on collateral theories in cosmology (for example, estimates on the total mass of the Universe, which in turn affects our understanding of whether or not space is curved and if so, positively or negatively)? Much of our current understanding of the cosmos is based directly on the correctness of the Theory of Relativity, but this finding (if confirmed) would appear to falsify at least some of relativity's conclusions. Does this tenative finding square with string theory? How much of Einstein's Theory of General Relativity will need to be updated to accomodate these findings?
Then again, the New Scientist isn't exactly the most unimpeachable scientific news source. Perhaps I won't trash Al's most famous (and best supported) theory just yet.
It was on a VERY hot day in a VERY polluted part of Germany in the 1970s.
The sky was a mauve colour.
But that would mean Hans Reinhardt's Cygnus and all his cloning research didn't really happen where it was supposed to... And exactly where did the USS Palomino go at the end of the movie?
Doesn't the notion of an "eternally collapsing" object violate entropy? Where is the infinite energy needed to make something collapse eternally going to come from?
And its angular momentum will be unchanged. So what's the problem?
The math is difficult to reproduce on a slashdot posting, but I'll leave it to anyone interested as homework. Suffice it to say that for L = angular momentum, I = moment of inertia, and w = angular velocity, L = I * w. Also, for a uniform sphere, I = 2/5 m r^2, where m = mass of the sphere, and r = radius of the sphere. It's easy to show that if r (before) = 2 * r(after), then w(before) = .25 w(after) (where "before" and "after" mean before and after squashing the basketball). And since the velocity v of a point on the equator of the spinning sphere is v = 2 * pi *r *w, it's also easy to show that every time you halve the diameter of the sphere, the linear velocity of a point on the surface doubles. This means that when angular momentum is unchanged, the limit of the linear velocity of any point on the sphere is finite as the radius goes to zero.
In case it wasn't obvious, IWAPMIC (I was a physics major in college).
Sean
Wouldn't this result in a real-universe equivalent of Zeno's paradox - i.e., wouldn't the collapsing mass always be moving closer to becoming a black hole but never arriving at that point due to the increasing time dilation?
It's a matter of perspective. An outside observer will never see a black hole fully form (although there will be a finite time at which the last photon from the collapsing star will be observed). However, an infalling observer will pass through the event horizon and hit the singularity within in finite proper time (measured by their own clock). See this FAQ.
Much of our current understanding of the cosmos is based directly on the correctness of the Theory of Relativity, but this finding (if confirmed) would appear to falsify at least some of relativity's conclusions.
No, MECOs supposedly are constructed within the framework of relativity. See this paper.
(I will chime in to agree with the skepticism of other posters; MECOs seem like a very contrived way to avoid the implications of black holes. Furthermore, general theorems in GR indicate that black holes form under very generic conditions, while no corresponding arguments exist showing how a MECO could plausibly form.
(This assumes that the MECO model isn't just plain wrong, which is possible, especially considering the publication record on this theory or lack thereof; I haven't studied the work closely enough to see if there are errors.)
Does this tenative finding square with string theory?
The cynic in me would say that any finding consistent with quantum mechanics and relativity squares with string theory...
There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something more bizarrely inexplicable.
There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
-The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
I think both physicists owe DNA a high five.
Women are like electronics: you don't know how damaged they are until you try to turn them on.
*I kill myself, I really do.
blarg.
for are we not men of science?
:-)--is that in search for a description of the universe builds upon a deprecating model, thereby making it more and more convoluted, until someone figures out a new model that simply explains everything we currently know with no caveats. I hope we're on the verge of one of them, because I really can't accept that new model for gravity in Scientific American a few months ago.
My dad's theory--I am not, in fact, 12
Please stop stalking me, bro.
Whoah guys, I just checked this one out and I must say... NOT WORK SAFE!
Okay, so you've been warned. I thought ya know, Hawking and his buddy were into some sort of high-priced real-estate investing and then WHOAH... like... wow. NOT what I expected.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
That's only the case for a static blackhole. That means that the stuff falling in is of infinitesimal mass and the metric is simply that of the blackholes and is by definition unchanging. In reality, stuff falling does matter, the mass of the blackhole increases and the event horizon expands.
Another very important point is that you don't only see things taking forever to fall into the static blackhole. What you see also becomes infinitely red shifted. Eventually you don't see anything at all.
It all works out to be completely consistent, and only confusing until you have your head wrapped around it.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
...that an eternally collapsing MECO being suspended on an eruption of quantum foam is a hearth god looking for the fire? (Shobogenzo, introduction)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I don't know if many people realize how silly this posting sounds when you take into accout the spanish slang term mecco.
c co
Take a look at this site and read the second reference.
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=me
Then reread the posting. Those dirty scientists somehow found a way to associate black (or perhaps brown) holes and meccos... hehe. Maybe it's only funny to me.
http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0505518
instead of analyzing a press release...
I wish my space ship kit would arrive in the mail, so I could build it, fly there, and check it out.
I'll let you know what is really going on in that quasar.
This also solves another gremlin. As there is no "time zero", there is no moment of creation. This is what concerned Professor Hawking, when he was asked by the Pope not to delve into the creation of the Universe - he'd just proved that there is no moment of creation and therefore no need of a creator.
MECOs are suspended within an eruption of quantum foam, if I understand things correctly. This does relate to the early Universe, because this eruption is closely related to cosmological Inflation, only in the other direction. If MECOs exist, it means that there is a strict division between a pre-Inflationary system and a post-Inflationary system, that you can move in one direction only between these states. This would make accelerators much more interesting, as they would then be strictly prohibited from recreating conditions that existed in the pre-Inflationary universe. As soon as you get to the borders, MECO theory suggests, the pressure from the virtual particles will always keep the system from going further.
This makes the theory very testable in the laboratory. Simply push the system towards very high energy densities. If the MECO theory is correct, your ability to do so will fall off and be asymtotic to the energy density required for inflation. (Thus, although the conditions are finite, there is some sort of feedback that makes the input required to actually achieve those conditions infinite.)
If experimental science fails to yield a force with the required properties, then MECOs probably do not exist. If experimental science always yields such a force, then black holes probably do not exist.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
MECOs are constantly collapsing, so the laws of thermodynamics which compell Black Holes to evaporate do not necessarily apply to MECOs in the same way, without any requirement for evaporation of mass/energy or of information. (This is because they're not in a pseudo-stable state as they are.) It would seem to follow that MECOs must exhibit different characteristics at this level.
Even if we were to say that the two were directly comparable, MECOs would be closer to a naked singularity (ie: a Black Hole without an event horizon) and almost certainly can only be spheres or related shapes. There would be nothing comparable to a Kerr Ring singularity in nature, although if you were to produce a MECO inside of a torus, it would have no way of collapsing beyond the torroidal shape, as the quantum foam would hold it apart at a certain point.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Black holes don't suck up everything in sight. If the Sun were a black hole of the same mass, we would orbit around it just the same.
This article has a better description of MECOs and also properly attributes the concept of MECOs to Indian astrophysicist Abhas Mitra.
People learn a sytem that works and develop a vested interest in it. Humans are much more emotional than rational, even scientists. If someone challenges that system because it seems "ugly" they get jumped on good. Whether a system works or "is correct" depends on perception. DDT works; Ptolemaic astronomy worked very well for a long time; blind cave fish have an understanding of reality that is complete, consistent, and works.
Many people don't think much of modern physics, it comes across as "ugly". Acolytes might refer to its beauty. Just because something seems to work is not a reason to like it or to not attack it at every possibility. After all, the pursuit of beauty is a worthwhile goal for a human being.
Mitra is a loon. Search Usenet discussions on sci.physics.relativity to long threads devoted to his nuttery.
I remember reading one of his papers claiming that black holes didn't exist. His argument rested on the claim that infalling particle trajectories (geodesics) went from timelike to lightlike as they cross an event horizon. But particles (with mass) can't be lightlike, therefore black holes are self-contradictory.
Well, (1) there is a simple theorem that says that no particle can ever go from timelike to spacetime in a solution of Einstein's field equation, and (2) black holes are unambiguously a solution of Einstein's field equation. (Mitra even admits the latter fact but seems oblivious of the former.) Furthermore, (3) what Mitra actually proved was not that geodesics become lightlike at the horizon, but that the event horizon is itself a lightlike (null) surface — an uncontested fact which has nothing to do with his argument.
All good and fine. But if we have decades of good work with black holes and we've appeared to find quite a few of them, then why would we be throwing them away with just one possible MECO sighting?
Because many of the old observations are likely also consistent with MECOs.
You see, when people say that an experiment is "testing the theory of black holes" or "testing the theory of general relativity", and the experiment is consistent with the theory, that experiment doesn't just provide evidence for the theory it was designed for, but also for a (potentially infinite) number of unstated theories.
Once there are two important alternative theories (MECOs and black holes), then people come up specifically with experiments to distinguish them.
(The whole thing is very 19th century and haphazard, but it's still how physicists work.)
The universe is a pretty vast thing. The general idea, as I understand it looking at this theory, is that space is an illusion that we perceive due to the genetic design of our brains and senses. Basically our minds couldn't handle the vast scope of what is really there; so, in order to handle it all our brains generate this illusion of space and a series of fundimental laws(common sense stuff) so that we can function in our environment.
;)
I don't necessarily agree with the theory, but it is interesting in concept. It would explain a few things like our inability to "explain how everything works" because we are trying to force the functions of the universe into our perceptions of how the universe works, which are inherantly flawed from the get go. It would also explain why Time, such a fundimental aspect of our lives, is so hard to conceptually visualise, and so on.
In essense, we've all been overcomplicating matters to try and fit with the way we "perceive" reality when, in fact, reality doesn't work at all like we experience it mentally. Again, I don't necessarily agree with this theory, but it is interesting.
My question would be, however, if space is an illusion and our perception of how the universe works is vastly different from how it functions, how can we be sure that any theory on how the universe functions is correct when we are incapable of observing the results correctly? It's like the old book that explains how dimensions work when the alien sphere travels down to visit the people of the 2 dimensional "Line Land". None of the people of line land can properly perceive the sphere because they live in a 2 dimensional world and only see him as an ever changing line that intersects their plane of reality. It's the same situation here only instead of dimensions, we are talking the fundimental functions of the universe versus our perception of them.
Anyway, this discussion is all philosphic in nature. The correct scientific approach is what we have been doing for ages now. Exhaust all possibilities through observation and experimentation, and should we eventually reach a point where nothing we try "works" then we know, beyond a doubt, that the correct answer is "none of the above" then start all over from a different approach. Which is why the goal of all scientists is to eventually come up with a "Theory of Everything" with one equation that explains everything. Because when we find that single equation that means we have correctly identified how the universe operates and can easily derive from that equation any alternate perceptions of the universe itself. The trick is getting there
You are who you are, let no one tell you different. But, never close your mind to a new point of view.
and you can get your car painted their for only 500 bucks
In defense of Mitra, the peer-reviewed paper published by Schild, Leiter, and Robertson references Mitra's work repeatedly. You sound like a black hole guy. These new observations by Schild et. al. appear to be a huge boost for the Mitra theory of MECOs. If other work confirms this, we will be talking about MECOs in the future rather than black holes.
Although I still find it disturbing that all cosmologists and theoretical physicists agree that (with regard to understanding) once you pass the event horizon, all bets are off.
Man, can't these scientists just hurry up and pick a theory already?
Blerg.
In defense of Mitra, the peer-reviewed paper published by Schild, Leiter, and Robertson references Mitra's work repeatedly.
How do you think that's a defense of Mitra? If anything, it's an incrimination of Schild et al. Mitra has gotten papers published. That doesn't mean his work isn't nonsense.
You sound like a black hole guy.
That has all the derogatory connotations of calling me a "round-Earth" guy.
Go over to this paper of Mitra's and tell me it doesn't have exactly the error I described. An error, I might add, that any grad student taking their first course in general relativity could point out; in fact, the theorem proving that timelike-somewhere geodesics are timelike-everywhere is deemed "the easiest exercise in the book" in Misner et al. Mitra never should have been published.
We have never observed a black hole. And we will never observe a black hole because there is no way we can look beyond an event horizon.
We have observed interactions with other objects that let us infer there might be a black hole there. Or something with similar properties as a black hole (say a MECO) according to our theory of how a black hole operates.
*poof*
The particle instantly moves from one place in the universe to another, with zero acceleration. Success in doing that would be strong evidence.
FTL drive here we come...
-- I have monkeys in my pants.
This paper seems to be a better example of Mitra's recent work on MECOs than your reference. It's easy to annonymously call someone a 'loon' in a public forum, as you have done. I, like all of us, have no idea if Mitra's ideas about MECOs are correct or not but they certainly deserve to be considered seriously, especially in light of the supporting observations that are the subject of this forum. Many important discoveries are made by people who were originally called 'loons' because they dared to think outside of the conventional thinking of their time. Copernicus comes to mind, with his 'loony' idea that the earth revolves around the sun when anyone could see with their own eyes that the sun traveled through the sky and therefore revolved around the earth.
It's easy to annonymously call someone a 'loon' in a public forum, as you have done. I, like all of us, have no idea if Mitra's ideas about MECOs are correct or not but they certainly deserve to be considered seriously
Speak for yourself, not for me. Mitra is incompetent; his papers have trivial flaws, one of which I have pointed out. Another is that he claims that there is a singularity at the event horizon of the Schwarzschild solution, when in fact there is only a coordinate singularity, not a true physical singularity. This has been known since the 1950s and is easily provable in Kruskal-Szekeres coordinates.
Bluster all you want, but Mitra's work is not credible. Anyone competent in general relativity can recognize these errors.
Many important discoveries are made by people who were originally called 'loons'
"They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."
99.9% of people who post loony material are actual loons, not the next Copernicus. And with Mitra, this is not the case of the establishment suppressing uncomfortable ideas. This is case of making trivial mathematical errors that most any half-educated graduate student could point out.
This is what I fear is the case. Looking down the evolutionary tree, we see that life forms have ever simpler (or plain different) means of perceiving the world. We're specifically adapted for the tasks of reproduction, and only abilities germaine to that task. We see a limited spectra of EMR, can sense the vibration of matter, and can distinguish certain chemicals important to our nourishment or relative toxicity. We're wired to think in terms of agents and causation, 3 dimensions, physical concepts dominant on our scale at the surface of the earth, and model everything in terms of discrete objects. All of our "artificial" advances are simply refinements or side effects of these abilities, limited in ways that we, by our very nature, will never appreciate. As you say, we can only hope to complete formulations of things which satisfy the limits of our design. It is a philosophical limitation, and therefore of no value in practical science. The difficult question is knowing what the most accurate abstraction of reality we are capable of is. Who would have guessed in 1820 that Relativity was on the way? Who knows what new rethinking may displace that in the future? I sometimes wonder if there may not be (or have been) someone whose superior ideas are so different from others (or just too poorly explained) that they are never appreciated and advanced. At the bleeding edge of physics, there are relatively few people who are capable of evaluating the merit of such ideas. As I recall someone else once writing, if Einstein were to suddenly become 50 times smarter than yourself, how could you tell?
The question of wether "Black Holes" exist is nothing new.
The only way that a singularity can exist in Einstien's Theory of General Relitivity is if you accept that there can be areas of space/time that have infinite states, ie, ininite mass or gravity. I've heard several Astrophysisits coment about how with GToR you have to create special cases for a classic "Black Hole" to exist because anytime you get an infinite value as a solution to a GToR equation you have to really wonder if you have done your math right.
A Gravistar matches the charicteristics of a singularity close enough to fit in with the observed data, but doesn't have infinite values in its equations. I don't know if they are compatiable with a MECO, but I don't see why not, they are both collapsed matter/energy and at the denistys involved there isn't much difference between the two, it might even be that a MECO is some sort of proto-gravistar.
Its been known for quite awhile that Einstien's GToR has some issues with it, 20 years from now he may be considered the same way Newton is now, his equations work great at the resolutions they where created from, but they don't explain everything, thats what (insert new theory here) does.
Disclaimer, IANAP
"Honestly, it's pointless to try to "define" personhood in any way that does not directly involve God.
Then define "God" without using circular logic or blind faith.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Black Holes are (or have, depending on how pedantic you want to be) singularities--that is their defining characteristic.
No. A black hole has an event horizon. That is its defining characteristic.
No detailed information about the inside of the black hole gets out through the event horizon. So we could never observe any singularity in a black hole, unless we were inside the black hole.
Furthermore, it is not possible to create a singularity, though it is theoretically possible to create an event horizon, by assembling enough matter in a small enough volume. The reason is that, because of the effect of the gravitational field on spacetime, an object falling toward an event horizon appears (to a far-away observer) to fall more and more slowly (a time-dilation effect) as it approaches the event horizon. To the far-away observer, it never appears to fall through the event horizon. Because of this, the Russian term for 'black hole' used to be 'frozen star'. Time appears to stop at the event horizon.
Things would look quite different to an observer falling through the event horizon, but that's not really relevant to the discussion. None of us plans to fall into a black hole, and nobody who fell into one could get out again to report.
When a really massive object collapses ... the collapse goes on unimpeded, which creates a defect in our coordinate system known as an event horizon.
A coordinate system is not reality, it's just part of our description of reality. One (naive) choice of coordinate system stops being useful at the event horizon. That just means one needs to pick another coordinate system if one wishes to describe events on both sides of the event horizon. There is no physical defect in anything at the event horizon. If your General Relativity textbook does not make this clear, you need to look at a better textbook.
"a" "single" "unit". You should have just stuck with ASCII, but even that is based on a number system and therefore the concept of "being" and "not being".
...because "hacker" sounds way sexier than "code drone."
"What? Waves AND particles simultaneously?" There's something to be said for noticing that a model of reality is a modality of a rule.
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
I thought MECO was a really lousy (if way too successful) 70's disco band (Disco version of the Star Wars theme, anyone?)
By the taping of my glasses, something geeky this way passes
You skipped a turn, and still owe us a definition of "God."
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
"God" is an axiom, and doesn't need definition, so your attempt at creating a fallacy of relevance fails. You can deny that "God" is what everyone understands it to be, but you're then forcing yourself into a world of non-standard logic and existence.
You skipped a turn, and you still owe us a definition of "1."
"We Don't Need No Truthless Heros!" - Project 86
...because "hacker" sounds way sexier than "code drone."
Oh, here's a real definition of "1":
"1" is the symbol for the numeral which represents the number one.
Really, I'm done trying to discuss anything meaningful with someone who thinks mockery is a legitimate form of argument. buh-bye!
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Seriously, if this thing really is an MECO then what are all of the things that we've thought were black holes?
Holly: Grit. Five specks of grit on the scanner-scope. See, the thing about grit is, it's black, and the thing about scanner-scopes...
Rimmer: Oh, shut up.
Full transcript here.
Yes, you can apply a force to it.
His theory has little scientific value. It is (at best) just an idiosyncratic interpretation of standard physics. A "visualization". A way to gain intuition. Not a predictive theory. I don't mean to belittle him -- he's asking interesting and insightful questions.
After all, I am strangely colored.
(Just for the sake of an entertaining discussion)
Applying force to a particle would modify its acceleration parameters. As a side effect that would affect the velocity parameters, and only affect position as a secondary side effect. Directly poking a new position parameter into a particle would instantly move it from one place to another without modifying acceleration or velocity. The particle would move from one place to another without traveling the intervening distance.
-- I have monkeys in my pants.
Your reasoning is all fine, but it seems like you're putting words in the OP's mouth. For one thing, if what you describe is possible, we'd end up with a perpetual motion machine. (Recall that work is force times distance. So we could instantly move a 10 kg mass up 10 meters (and expend no work doing it since by hypothesis no force is applied to the mass) to gain around 10,000 J of energy. This is implausible, and I don't think it was the OP's intention to suggest it. (Though I do realize your post was just for the sake of an entertaining discussion)
I would assume it comes from potential energy. As an object falls towards the black hole, it accelerates due to gravity, converting potential energy into kinetic. I suppose under the right set of conditions the object would miss with a velocity impressively near the speed of light, which would of course decay as it shot off, trading kinetic energy for potential. All relative to the black hole, of course, and my thoughts here are clumsily Newtonian.
The point I think you're missing is that in either case the energy has to come from somewhere. A magnetic field is not a magical source of energy, it's just a different means of...trying to think of the proper term...transferring (?) energy than a gravitational field. Magnetic potential versus gravitational potential should have no effective difference here.
According to this Meco is a kind of energy that mythicle company named Shinra uses in order to power technicle devices. The two theories aren't mutually exclussive. One describes a way to infitely produce energy and matter in a vacume by converting a super particles of matter and energy into a variety of particles such as photonos and neutrons, while the other describes a super dense region of space where time, space, and even strings and light are forced into a area the size of a pin head, and all things are mutally anilited in a suden unpredictable and violent explosion of neutrinos, tachions and possbile even x-ray particles.
That is, unless you're so insecure that you must have a creation mythos to explain your existence.
...and no, I don't think "string theory," or any of the esoteric physical theories represent any form of "reality." They're just mathematical constructions which strive to be part of a self-consistent mathematical system which is also used to measure observatons.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Assertion? Well, that's better than naked aggression. But, naked insertion....
Anyway...
If the twin black holes took up orbit around Uranus, I could see the pucker factor going up a few notches... Due to such proximity, it is clear that the stresses would tear the rings of Uranus apart, sending the solar system, if not the galaxy, stumbling along in a throbbing, coalescing sort of way...
Unfortunately, such an idea would make Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang eligible for a re-make, as bored as hollywood is these days...
Hold on... I'll get back in about 5 centons...
(Wait, my random sentence generator is bunging...)
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
How do you explain a "Deaf Leopard" or a "Deaf Leper"? With "Def Leopard"?
T F-8&oe=UTF-8
As for "Mad" and "Onna", well, if you give one word to English and one to Japanese, you have "Crazy Woman"... Not much of an explanation, but plenty of definition:
http://www.google.com/search?q=onna+japanese&ie=U
But, even if she IS crazy, she is RICH as hell... and crazy and rich in her case could go together well..
(On Meesa planet weesa call da crazy woman buku royale..)
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
I agree that we are mostly agreeing. The one point where we may possibly differ: you paint a picture of monotonic convergence, where we get steadily closer to "the Truth," which I would agree is a common process in science. But it is not the only way things happen. Just as often, a system of iterative refinements such as you describe must be swept away to make room for a system which is ultimately better but was not seen until after we had progressed some way down the "wrong" road. The whole cycles and epicycles edifice in astronomy comes to mind, as well as cold blooded dinosaurs, or Frege, Whitehead and Russell's royal road to the heart of mathematics etc.
The tricky part about these sorts of things is that you can't tell ahead of time which parts of the structure you're going to have to throw out.
--MarkusQ
As I read that quasars ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasar ) are very far away, from 780 million light years to 13 billion light years away, we see them as they were when the universe was quite young. It's not unthinkable that the rules of the universe dynamically change, why would they be fixed rules? the universe expands? what would an expansion of the universe mean for the speed of light? Black holes have been found much closer to home, as many think there is one at the centre of our own milky way galaxy ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milkyway#Structure ) and are thought to exist in many galaxies. In my humble opinion quasars and black holes are quite different types of objects in space, even more so when it comes to the age of our universe, in the time these objects exist. That we can observe quasars now, does not mean they still exist. For black holes, our observations are much more 'fresh'. It is possible that the two types of objects can both exist in our universe, given the fact that they existed in different times.( And perhaps a different ruleset of our universe?)
Don't speak about time until you have spoken to him.
You, my friend, have made the funniest post I have read on slashdot in ages.
...
... massive ignorance.
... not sure which camp I want to insult by including Penrose in - is anything but ignorant. With great knowledge and an almost brilliant intelligence he asserts things that we find abhorent to our cores - that all things are physically possibly with these cool stringy-math things... *almost* unprovable - one can only create *thought* experiments to shoot down string theory - but physical experiments are so much harder. His theory walks the edge of what is and is not a scientific theory like a skiddoo on November lake ice (sorry - Canadian).
Must comment
Though to analyze is to destroy funny.
Dang.
The Alaskan is a *complete* boob. We are frustrated with his assertions because they are founded upon inscrutably, inconceivably, tragically,
The 'physicist' or 'mathematician'
He also believes (as he asserts in his two Hofstadter wannabe books) that a mathematician 'in principle' can prove or disprove any statement for which a proof platonicly exists... since no machine can, by Turing's and Godel's arguments, be able to prove or disprove any (ie: every) assertion. Penrose argues that mathematicians must have an extra-mechanical physical element providing their ability to prove anything. Penrose, bizarrely, argues strongly that artificial intelligence is impossible because no computer could ever do math like a person.
The intense hatred for the two human failings that drive these personalities, my feelings, my hatred, render the equation of seething ignorance and transcendent idealism - they render it totally fucking hilarious.
I hope the mods don't read this - what does it say about me that if I only had one bullet and a hall with the two boobs at opposite ends it I would be deadlocked? Who to 'save' the world from - so hard...
I know it would just sound a bit paranoid, but, I ever had a fear of our planet being sucked by fscking black hole during my life. Please someone tell me those MECO are not as nasty as black holes.
Your ad could be here!
the Ori will no longer have a power source for their Supergates.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.