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Black Hole Information Loss Paradox Solution Proposed

Anuborn Satirak writes to tell us that Physicists from Case Western Reserve University claim to have cracked the black hole information loss paradox that has puzzled physicists for the past 40 years. "The physicists are quick to assure astronomers and astrophysicists that what is observed in gravity pulling masses together still holds true, but what is controversial about the new finding is that 'from an external viewer's point it takes an infinite amount of time to form an event horizon and that the clock for the objects falling into the black hole appears to slow down to zero,' said Krauss, director of Case's Center for Education and Research in Cosmology."

252 comments

  1. 1/0 by eclectus · · Score: 5, Funny

    It's what happens in the physical world when you divide by zero.

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    This signature is a waste of 42 characters
    1. Re:1/0 by Archangel+Michael · · Score: 1
      --
      Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
  2. Solved tihs alrelady by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    Ah, esay one, I sloevd tihs one aegs ago, the irofntamion pbalbroy got lsot alnog the way.

    1. Re:Solved tihs alrelady by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Preservation of the positions of the first and last characters in each word. There was a study done by some university about it a while back; it works because we read in words, not letter-by-letter--or something like that.

    2. Re:Solved tihs alrelady by Gherald · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

      -- http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/~mattd/Cmabrigde/

    3. Re:Solved tihs alrelady by guruevi · · Score: 2, Interesting

      The problem that the study didn't take into account is when somebody has another native tongue (but understands the language the garble is written in) like me. My native tongue has similar words to English, similar spellings yet different meanings to the words. So once you start using combinations of letters that have similar words in the native tongue, people get confused.

      --
      Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
    4. Re:Solved tihs alrelady by mshurpik · · Score: 1

      It's true, I was able to read your post almost without stopping.

      Offtopic tho.

      And I've heard this before.

    5. Re:Solved tihs alrelady by yogurtforthesoul · · Score: 1, Funny

      I alssoo fiigguuurrreeeeeddddd ttttthhhhhhiiiiiiisssssssss ooooooooouuuuuuuuuutttttttttttttt,,,,,,,,,,,,, bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuttttttttttttt tttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt....

      --
      Something witty goes here.
    6. Re:Solved tihs alrelady by bdjacobson · · Score: 1

      It's true, I was able to read your post almost without stopping.

      Offtopic tho.

      And I've heard this before. Well God forbid you have to read something you already know. Must be nothing to read in the world.
    7. Re:Solved tihs alrelady by ozydingo · · Score: 1

      Of course I find it necesary to point out to other readers who may assume your link as a source of backup without actually reading it, that the linked-to page, under the cam.ac.uk domain, actually shows the quote you provided, circulating in so many emails, to be false. There was no such study at Cambridge University; however there was a similar study with somewhat more complex results done at Nottingham University. From the page: 2) Big ccunoil tax ineesacrs tihs yaer hvae seezueqd the inmcoes of mnay pneosenirs 3) A dootcr has aimttded the magltheuansr of a tageene ceacnr pintaet who deid aetfr a hatospil durg blendur Perhaps you can read those without a problem--I certainly couldn't, and I'll wager that most cannot. The page's author goes on to explain how there are clearly some words that cannot be read in this manner (such as "salt" and "slat," a poor choice of example by my opinion due to the infrequent common usage of the word "slat"), methods by which text may be insignificantly jumbled that would ease the reading (used in the quote to artificially show the point), and then goes on for longer than I care to read since I'm getting later and later for work.

    8. Re:Solved tihs alrelady by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/~mattd/Cmabrigde/

      It works on urls too. You can't tell but I changed the letters in http too!
    9. Re:Solved tihs alrelady by doti · · Score: 1

      I'm from Brazil, and has never been on a English-speaking country, yet I can read that without a problem.
      Maybe because I read at lot of English since I started using computers, back in 1989.

      --
      factor 966971: 966971
    10. Re:Solved tihs alrelady by lhand · · Score: 1

      It's probably just because you're used to reading slashdot.

    11. Re:Solved tihs alrelady by tehcyder · · Score: 1

      Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.
      I don't normally consider myself a spelling Nazi, but that post was almost unintelligible.
      --
      To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
  3. obviously by Lord+Ender · · Score: 5, Funny

    Of course that's true, but is it also the case that a black hole can hold a stargate open, slowly sucking all of the surrounding area around the other gate into its time dilation bubble? Really, as a taxpayer funding this research, I want answers.

    --
    A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
    1. Re:obviously by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      Of course that's the case. Living near Colorado, I can distinctly remember my friends near Cheyenne Mountain inexplicably losing hours on December 8th, 1998.

    2. Re:obviously by wizardforce · · Score: 0, Redundant

      Of course that's true, but is it also the case that a black hole can hold a stargate open, slowly sucking all of the surrounding area around the other gate into its time dilation bubble? Really, as a taxpayer funding this research, I want answers.
      Well as you know after O'neille and Sam got trapped on that ice planet they figured out eventually that the weapons fire behind them had caused the wormhole to switch gates [from SGC to antarctica] using that knowledge they then dealt with the later blackhole problem by detonating a high explosive device to cause the wormhole to switch gates thus taking the problematic gravity from the blackhole with it. thus we having learned from their mistakes intend to have a stock of 2 or 3 of these high explosive device just for such an occasion.
      --
      Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
    3. Re:obviously by kryten_nl · · Score: 3, Funny

      You are correct, it's known as the Tachyon-effect, in this case facilitated by the Einstein-Bohr-Hawking-Kryten-bridge. Can't find the wiki-page atm, I'll do a search later and post back.

      --
      For the perfect anti-Unix, write an OS that thinks it knows what you're doing better than you do and let it be wrong.
    4. Re:obviously by Fordiman · · Score: 1

      Props for the random inclusion of everyone's favorite british robot butler - aside from Mr. Butlertron.

      --
      110100 1101000 1101000 1100110 0 1101111 1101000 1100011 1
  4. Link to paper by shma · · Score: 5, Informative

    Here's the preprint.

    --
    I came here for a good argument
    1. Re:Link to paper by MouseR · · Score: 4, Funny

      Rahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!! My head!

    2. Re:Link to paper by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Here's the preprint

      Rahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!! My head!

      Yeah, that little mistake in the math killed it for me too.
    3. Re:Link to paper by NewbieProgrammerMan · · Score: 1

      For a second there, I figured the link above must have gone to something truly incomprehensible. Come on, it really wasn't that bad. :)

      --
      [b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
    4. Re:Link to paper by Joe+Snipe · · Score: 1

      I always wondered if Dr Bronner had children...

      --
      Sometimes, life itself is sarcasm...
  5. So... by MontyApollo · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Are they saying black holes are perpetually in the creation phase, or they just don't exist at all unless they formed at the beginning of time?

    1. Re:So... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

      I think what they're saying is, if I put my cock into a black hole, or as some call it, a nappy headed black ho hole, I will last a really long time. Which is good news, because I love the badonkadonk. Baby got back, daddy like, daddy like. Shout out to my Slashdot sistahs. Give it up ladies, daddy want to tap that puzzizle with his dizzle.

    2. Re:So... by lawpoop · · Score: 4, Informative

      Well, IINAP, but I think it's more like the actual hole part doesn't exist until the *end* of the universe.

      A black hole is not a thing that exists in time and space, it's an event or process that is a warping the space-time fabric. It's a fine point, but it bears repeating -- a black hole is not a 'thing' that warps time-space, it *is* a warping of time-space. An object actually moving to the center of the black hole takes an infinitely long time to get there, so when it actually does get there, it happens to arrive right at the end of the universe.

      So it kind of is like the black hole is perpetually in creation phase, but the matter doesn't disappear until the end of the universe. I read a post a few years back that the word for black hole in Russian is 'Collapsar'. Like a Pulsar always 'pulses', matter is always ( literally *always*, or, from now until the end of time ) collapsing in a Collapsar.

      --
      Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
      -- Pablo Picasso
    3. Re:So... by alcmaeon · · Score: 0, Flamebait

      Oh come on guys, this is funnier than half of the posts that are trying to be funny, but you modded it down to troll. I didn't think /. was so politically correct.

      Becoming infinitely long and lasting until the end of time does sound like fun.

    4. Re:So... by BalkanBoy · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Well, the litmus test of whether this would be funny is if you were black, and around the age of 13-16. If you are still laughing then, you're free to mod the parent up as 'Funny'.

      It's got nothing to do with Slashdot. What's 'funny' is as relative as the universe... If I said some of the thing I find funny, someone may even shoot me... So much for freedom of speech, right?

      --
      'A lie if repeated often enough, becomes the truth.' - Goebbels
    5. Re:So... by Quaoar · · Score: 1

      Except the black hole evaporates before the end of the universe, so the in-falling object never disappears. In fact, if you had a large enough black hole, the tidal forces at the event horizon would not be strong enough to rip you apart, and you could conceivably survive falling into one (from your point of view, the black hole would shrink in front of your eyes). Assuming you weren't baked by the x-rays produced by a supermassive black hole, you could travel trillions of years into the future unscathed.

      --
      I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
    6. Re:So... by lawpoop · · Score: 1

      Well, I think that the proponents of this theory are claiming that the matter does *not* actually disappear until the end of time.

      --
      Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
      -- Pablo Picasso
    7. Re:So... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      In Russian, "black hole" is slang for anus. Good reason to come up with another name.

    8. Re:So... by codergeek42 · · Score: 1

      "An object actually moving to the center of the black hole takes an infinitely long time to get there, so when it actually does get there, it happens to arrive right at the end of the universe. "

      While I understand your intent in that sentence, your wording is a bit misleading. If it arrives right at the end of the universe, then it has done so after a finite and terminating length of time (even if arbitrarily as long as the universe itself). This means that the item would in fact reach the mass point of the black hole.

      On the contrary, if it takes an infinitely long time to get there, then it would always approach the mass point and be extremely near to it, but never reaching it. (If it helps, think of this as if it were a mathematical limit from beginning studies of calculus: the fact that the object takes an infinite amount of time to reach to the center of the black hole but gets infinitely close to it means that for any given distance away from the black hole there is at least one interval of time from when the object initially was caught in the hole's gravity well in which it was _exactly_ that distance from the center.)

    9. Re:So... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I think a black hole sucked up your [/b] tag there.

    10. Re:So... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Balck Hole in Russian is Chernia D'ira=Black Hole literally.Not some "collapsar"

    11. Re:So... by jtpalinmajere · · Score: 1

      Could you explain to me how the end of the universe equates to the end of infinity? Last I checked there isn't one which would make that incredibly long span it took the black hole to finally "form" into existence would still be infinitely smaller than infinity.

      As the article points out at the end, if you take that reasoning and assume that a black hole *does* exist then it could not have "formed" into existence... it simply had to be there to begin with (ie. there will never be more than there are now) OR come into existence in some other, likely un-observable, fashion than being "formed" (more may pop up at some point in time, but you'd never be able to watch its formation... one day it's not there, the next it is).

      The best way that *I* like to describe black holes are in terms black holes of knowledge. Something *is* happening to make star's change their course, or to bend light, and likely due to the existence of some *thing* that we simply do not have the means or know-how to detect. All we can currently detect are the side-effects of said thing being in existence. Give us enough time (albeit that may be æons) and I'm sure we'll finally hit the nail on the head and the conventional notion of black holes may very well go away.

    12. Re:So... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      An object actually moving to the center of the black hole takes an infinitely long time to get there, so when it actually does get there, it happens to arrive right at the end of the universe. does anyone want to venture in Milliways?
    13. Re:So... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This probably counts as nitpicking, but you mention that it takes an infinite amount of time, and so will arrive at the end of the universe.

      That seems like a bit of a paradox in and of itself- if time is infinite and unconnected to the existence of the universe, then infinite time would indicate that objects pulled into a black hole would exist beyond the end of the universe.

      If time is connected to the universe such that the end of one is the end of the other, then you have two possibilities. Either time is not infinite, as it ceases with the end of the universe, or time is infinite, and therefore the universe does not end.

      Of course, the other possibility here would be that time is not infinite but also not connected to the end of the universe, which would mean that the objects traveling to the center of the black hole would reach the center when time ceased, either before the end of the universe (which would probably be worth its own debate over whether that would effectively be at the end of the universe or if that would effectively make the universe exist infinitely) or after the end of the universe. Which again, you could probably think about for a lifetime.

    14. Re:So... by Oersoep · · Score: 1

      So...If you jump in, time slows down for you compared to the "outside"?
      So...You instantly hop into the "end of the universe"?
      So...Nothing reaches the center as long as anyone on the "outside" can watch?

      Question:
      Where does the radiation come from? Did anything ever reach the center?

      I'm getting kind of confused here...

      Is a black hole a portal to what comes beyond (or after) the universe?
      Does a black hole indicate that there will be an end to it?
      Does a black hole indicate that there will never be an end to it?
      If the whole universe gets sucked in, will we notice? (guess not, cause if time itself slows down so do we)
      Will the universe end when all matter has been sucked in?
      What are the forces near a black hole if you take into account the devaluation of the second?

    15. Re:So... by skarphace · · Score: 1

      As the article points out at the end, if you take that reasoning and assume that a black hole *does* exist then it could not have "formed" into existence... it simply had to be there to begin with (ie. there will never be more than there are now) OR come into existence in some other, likely un-observable, fashion than being "formed" (more may pop up at some point in time, but you'd never be able to watch its formation... one day it's not there, the next it is).
      The problem with this is that we already know that black holes are forming. We've seen evidence of starts going nova and creating them. I believe we've even created mini-black holes in particle colliders which instantly dissipate.
      --
      Bullish Machine Tzar
    16. Re:So... by tighr · · Score: 1

      That's just for physicists... Engineers, on the other hand, like to think of things as being sufficiently close. So if Y=0 as X approaches infinity, by the time X gets to, oh, say, 10, its close enough to just go ahead and call it zero.

      That's not to say you're not right, of course.

    17. Re:So... by lawpoop · · Score: 1

      So...If you jump in, time slows down for you compared to the "outside"? Basically, yes. What happens is that as you approach the infinite mass of the singularity, the light is also affect by gravity, and it slows down. Since light is the yardstick by which we measure speed, it looks like you and everything else slows down as you approach infinite mass. When you get to the singularity, light comes to a complete stop, so there is no speed. Again, IANAP.

      So...You instantly hop into the "end of the universe"? ... I *guess* you could say so. It's maybe more like a local end. It depends on how you define end of the universe.

      So...Nothing reaches the center as long as anyone on the "outside" can watch? Well, it's all a matter of observer position. As Einstein demonstrated to us, it's all relative to the speed of the observer.

      Where does the radiation come from? Did anything ever reach the center? Things rotating around the singularity get torn up before they disappear, and that produces radiation, some of which can escape.

      Is a black hole a portal to what comes beyond (or after) the universe? I don't know. I would guess it's more like a portal to nowhere.

      Does a black hole indicate that there will be an end to it? End to what? The black hole or the universe itself?

      Does a black hole indicate that there will never be an end to it? Again, I'm not sure what you're asking.

      If the whole universe gets sucked in, will we notice? (guess not, cause if time itself slows down so do we) I think you're right, but I think the balance of gravity in the universe on the whole would prevent that.

      Will the universe end when all matter has been sucked in? Not sure.

      What are the forces near a black hole if you take into account the devaluation of the second? Not sure, it might. Ask a physicist. But I'm tempted to say it doesn't, because it's all relative. OTOH, I think there are some phenomena that depend on the current 'specs' of the laws of nature, so when you do approach infinite mass, the specs change, so then new particles form, and other particles disappear, or can't exist under current conditions.

      So if matter is condensed to the point where gravity is stonger than electromagnetic force, for example, atoms with nucleuses can't form, because they are smushed together by gravity more than they they are repelled by electromagnetic force. So it's a hypercondensed soup of matter rather than atoms. This change of the state of matter, I think, is what happens in the shredding of matter when it gets close to the singularity. The big bang happened after a singularity, and immediately afterwards was hypercondensed energy, because the universe was so dense, electromagnetic force couldn't overcome gravity to separate out the energies into atoms. So a black hole kind of acts like the beginning of the universe, the closer to singularity you get.

      Again, IANAP, so it might be leading you astray. It's weird stuff, kind of abstract and hard to wrap your brain around.
      --
      Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
      -- Pablo Picasso
    18. Re:So... by Hertzman · · Score: 1

      An object actually moving to the center of the black hole takes an infinitely long time to get there, so when it actually does get there, it happens to arrive right at the end of the universe. Not true. From the objects point of view it takes only fractions of a second to reach the center. But from an observer, outside the event horizon, it will take an infinite amount of time. But as no information can travel from an object inside the event horizon, this is merely a mathematical curiosa. We can only calculate what happens and how long it'll take. We can never "see" it happen.
  6. I'm confused by Hoi+Polloi · · Score: 1

    I'm probably missing something here but from all I've read about black holes I've always read that it would appear to an observer that your clock would slow towards 0 (which is what they say in the article). So hasn't this been proposed in general already? Are they saying that you'd never appear to reach the event horizon?

    --
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    1. Re:I'm confused by Otter · · Score: 1

      Same here. I could swear we saw a movie in junior high school science class where a cartoon clock slowed and stopped as it fell into a black hole.

    2. Re:I'm confused by harrkev · · Score: 1

      According to "traditional" theory, the person going INTO the black hole would appear to never get there. Not so from a person who is a safe distance away watching with a telescope.

      What is new is that this new theory predicts that the person WATCHING would also never see the event horizon. How this works is completely unclear from the article. They seem to be saying that new black holes cannot form.

      However, simple physics predicts that if you get enough mass in a small-enough area, the escape velocity exceeds C, so black holes CAN exist.

      Somewhere there is a contradiction. Can somebody explain?

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    3. Re:I'm confused by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      However, simple physics predicts that if you get enough mass in a small-enough area, the escape velocity exceeds C, so black holes CAN exist.

      Perhaps the density of a black hole is a fundamental limit for particle density, like c is for the speed of light?

    4. Re:I'm confused by kebes · · Score: 4, Informative
      The article preprint (Warning: PDF) is fairly readable (although obviously still quite technical). This is my understanding based upon that preprint. Note that I'm not a cosmologist, so I would appreciate others to point out any mistakes I make.

      Firstly, they emphasize in their paper that they are considering their problem from the point of view of an external observer, rather than the point of view of an observer falling into the black hole. They write:

      The process of black hole formation is generally discussed from the viewpoint of an infalling observer. However, in all physical settings it is the viewpoint of the asymptotic observer that is relevant. More concretely, if a black hole is formed in the Large Hadron Collider, it has to be observed by physicists sitting on the CERN campus.
      They also contrast their results with previously accepted analysis of black hole formation:

      In Sec. III we verify the standard result that the formation of an event horizon takes an infinite (Schwarzschild)time if we consider classical collapse. This is not surprising and is often viewed as a limitation of the Schwarzschild coordinate system. To see if this result changes when quantum effects are taken into account, we address the problem of quantum collapse using a minisuperspace version of the functional Schrodinger equation [2] in Sec. IV. We find that even in this case the black hole takes an infinite time to form, contrary to some speculations in the literature [3].
      So, in essence, they are presenting findings that suggest that even quantum effects are taken into account, the collapse takes an infinite amount of time. This is signficant because it means that while the collapsing mass can appear to get closer and closer to being a singularity, it can never really achieve this final state to an external observer. How this relates to information loss is then described:

      the shell, even as it collapses, radiates away its energy in a finite amount of time... we conclude that the evaporation time is shorter than what would be taken by objects to fall through a black hole horizon.
      So, in essence, the collapse of the black hole takes an infinite amount of time, during which time the black hole will evaporate via Hawking radiation. So objects falling into a black hole will never actually be swallowed up into the black hole (though they will get arbitrarily close and arbitrarily crushed!). Since the collapse is never really complete, information about the objects is never entirely lost. The emitted radiation will thus contain 'information' about the infalling objects. This in some way can be seen to resolve the seeming information paradox, whereby black holes were seemingly able to 'swallow up' information and completely destroy it (whereas no other process in the universe appeared able to do so).
    5. Re:I'm confused by MontyApollo · · Score: 1

      Good job explaining that. Thanks.

    6. Re:I'm confused by pavon · · Score: 2, Informative

      That is what I have always heard as well. I don't think that is the new part - probably just bad editorialism. It sounds like the new part is about the formation of the black hole itself - namely that to an outside observer, a star (or other large mass) will appear to take an infinite amount of time to collapse into a black hole and thus will appear to never form an event horizon.

    7. Re:I'm confused by Original+Replica · · Score: 1

      The process of black hole formation is generally discussed from the viewpoint of an infalling observer. However, in all physical settings it is the viewpoint of the asymptotic observer that is relevant. More concretely, if a black hole is formed in the Large Hadron Collider, it has to be observed by physicists sitting on the CERN campus.


      If they do make a black hole in the Large Hadron Collider, what makes them think that the CERN campus won't fall in?
      --
      We are all just people.
    8. Re:I'm confused by DMUTPeregrine · · Score: 1

      It won't be big enough to avoid evaporating.

      --
      Not a sentence!
    9. Re:I'm confused by kestasjk · · Score: 1

      So the latest solution to the Hawking paradox is "black holes don't exist"?!

      --
      // MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
    10. Re:I'm confused by Khashishi · · Score: 3, Interesting

      No, that's not correct. Normal GR predicts that (in the frame of someone away from the BH) the person falling into the black hole will take an infinite amount of time to reach the event horizon. In GR infinite time isn't the same thing as never! In the frame of the person falling into the BH (the proper time frame,) the faller crosses the event horizon in finite time and hits the center quite quickly (for non-huge black holes). The confusion and controversy lies in the concept of infinite time. Some take it to mean that black holes can't actually form (and must either be primordial or not exist). But infinite time might be a finite distance away due to weirdness with coordinates. An object falling through an event horizon might pass through infinite future and then travel back in time from the infinite future to the current. In the outside viewers frame, there might be two copies of the in-falling person, one inside and one outside. In this scenario, black holes can exist, and can contain the mass of stuff that falls into the hole...before it falls into the hole! Or it could all be bullshit and artifact of a broken theory of gravity.

    11. Re:I'm confused by kebes · · Score: 4, Interesting

      So the latest solution to the Hawking paradox is "black holes don't exist"?!
      In a strict sense, yes. However, the objects people typically think of as "black holes" would still exist. Let me be more clear.

      To my understanding, the suggestion is that the collapsing matter will never create a true event horizon (a boundary from which nothing can ever escape). However this doesn't prevent the matter from collapsing to an arbitrarily high density and creating an increasingly large escape velocity. Think of a dense chunk of matter (but not infinitely dense). It will warp spacetime around it significantly, and it will bend the direction of light rays significantly. If a ray of light strays too close to the center of this quasi-singularity, it will get caught in a tight orbit. Now, the orbit won't be truly stable, and the light ray will, after some rotations around the gravity well, finally escape.

      The denser the quasi-singularity is, the more rays will get trapped (temporarily) in these orbits, and the longer they will stay trapped. At a certain point, when light is being trapped for 10E80 year, the object could very sensibly be called a black hole. For all intents and purposes, infalling light does not escape. In principle, in a very long time the light may escape. Or, according to this new theory, the black hole may evaporate before actually forming (although this, too, will take a long time). But the massive curvature of spacetime will still lead to all the light-trapping and time-dilating effects normally predicted for black holes. This theory is merely suggesting that the containment is not absolute. Eventually, the stuff will escape. (Although for material objects, they will have been crushed and distorted beyond recognition. But at least in principle, the 'information' about them wasn't lost.)

      Under the new theory, objects of near-infinite density still form, and still (in any practical sense) trap all incoming matter. However the question comes down to whether the singularity at the center is a true singularity with a true event horizon, or a perpetually-collapsing mass that has not quite yet reached the point of being a true black hole.
    12. Re:I'm confused by king-manic · · Score: 1

      Traditionally the idea is from an outside observer a object falling into a black hole never makes it as any information flowing from that object is slowed by gravity as it escapes. Until it cannot escape at the event horizon.

      --
      "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
    13. Re:I'm confused by DragonWriter · · Score: 4, Insightful

      If they do make a black hole in the Large Hadron Collider, what makes them think that the CERN campus won't fall in?


      Because if the black hole was big enough to suck in the CERN campus with its gravity, the matter from which it was formed would have the same effect.
    14. Re:I'm confused by grimdawg · · Score: 2, Interesting

      What about for the infalling observer?

      He's entered the black hole, and information has been lost to him. I can get my head around thinking that information is relative, but now the laws of the universe hold for some people but not others?

      OTOH, if I was falling into a black hole, entropy's the least of my worries.

      --
      There are 10 kinds of people in this world: those who understand binary, and nine other kinds of people.
    15. Re:I'm confused by TexVex · · Score: 1

      whereby black holes were seemingly able to 'swallow up' information and completely destroy it (whereas no other process in the universe appeared able to do so).
      What about photons travelling in an uninterrupted path towards the edge of the observable universe? I assume they would be irretrievably lost in ever-expanding space, with anything they could possibly interact with receding from them faster than they move.
      --
      Fun with Anagarams! LADS HOST, SHALT DOS. HAS DOLTS. AD SLOTHS, HATS SOLD. ASS HO, LTD.
    16. Re:I'm confused by kestasjk · · Score: 1

      I like it, thanks for explaining, but what happens to matter that was within the event horizon before the black holes form? So if a bit of matter is the center around which a black hole is forming, surely that bit of matter will be within the event horizon and its information will be lost?

      If you're feeling up to a challenge: how does matter get "evaporated" when EMR can't escape, why must information be preserved, and does this mean that after evaporating enough matter black holes would burst back out and let all the stuff they captured back out?

      --
      // MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
    17. Re:I'm confused by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      But infinite time might be a finite distance away due to weirdness with coordinates. An object falling through an event horizon might pass through infinite future and then travel back in time from the infinite future to the current. In the outside viewers frame, there might be two copies of the in-falling person, one inside and one outside. In this scenario, black holes can exist, and can contain the mass of stuff that falls into the hole...before it falls into the hole! yeah, I think I remember learning that in college. While doing bong hits up on the roof of the chemistry department...
    18. Re:I'm confused by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This is also what happens when you die. You never experience the point of death, just draw closer and closer towards it in an endless crushing infinity of perception.

    19. Re:I'm confused by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's all a bunch of hooey.

      When something is approaching the event horizon, it never quite gets there are far as an outside observer is concerned. It does "vanish", but that's because the wavelengths get so freakishly long that it is practically undetectable. In other words, the object is infinitely red-shifted into oblivion.

      Now, if you're the poor soul falling toward the event horizion, you actually do cross over. But if you could look back over your shoulder, the universe you just came from has ended. Game over. Really.

      No information is really "lost", it's just "frozen" until the end of time to an outside observer. For the insider observer, the outside universe has sped up and run out. There's no going back.

      I guess it's just as well. In the long run we're all dead, anyway.

    20. Re:I'm confused by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      ...but now the laws of the universe hold for some people but not others?

      Why does that surprise you?

    21. Re:I'm confused by kebes · · Score: 4, Informative

      So if a bit of matter is the center around which a black hole is forming, surely that bit of matter will be within the event horizon and its information will be lost?

      That's a rather zen question, actually. In some ways it amounts to asking "What's the difference between the matter that forms the black hole, and the matter that is falling into it?" Conventionally, the answer would be: all the matter inside the event horizon is part of the black hole, and everything outside the event horizon is falling into it (or, rather, is being gravitationally attracted towards it, and may or may not actually fall).

      If this new bit of theory is correct, then the answer actually becomes harder, because the event horizon never forms, so you can't really say that some matter is inside vs. outside. Of course there is probably a sensible way to define a "pseudo-horizon" based upon a threshold where the probability of light escaping sharply drops towards 0.

      I guess another way of thinking about it would be to say that this hypothetical matter that is "at the center of where the black hole is forming" would inevitably be included into the collapsing mass and would thus, itself, become part of the black hole.

      If you're feeling up to a challenge: how does matter get "evaporated" when EMR can't escape,

      It's true that EMR that enters the event horizon cannot escape. The evaporation process, called Hawking radiation, is a quantum effect that has no conventional analogue. Basically, in quantum mechanics (or rather quantum field theory), it is predicted that "virtual particles" randomly appear and disappear all the time. These virtual particles actually carry the force of things like the electric fields, magnetic fields, gravitational fields, etc. (they also avoid 'action at a distance' problems...). So in the vacuum, you will get random particle-antiparticle pairs appearing at random, and annihilating each other a moment later (these constant fluctuations are very important in modern theories, actually). If you imagine one of these random fluctuations occurring right beside an event horizon, you can imagine that one of the two particles gets sucked into the event horizon, but the other one escapes and sails off into the universe. The particle entering the black hole will actually reduce its mass (not increase it, as one would normally expect... though the proof of this requires digging into the math quite a bit), and the particle that escapes thereby carries away some of the mass of the black hole. Thus, over time, the blackhole is basically emitting radiation and slowly 'evaporating.'

      Now, I know this idea of "virtual particles" randomly appearing and disappearing sounds totally bizarre. In fact it sounds like pseudo-science or an overcomlicated story that particle physicists are weaving. However these effects do have experimental backing (e.g. Casimir forces).

      why must information be preserved, and does this mean that after evaporating enough matter black holes would burst back out and let all the stuff they captured back out?

      It turns out the rate of evaporation increases as you decrease in size. So really "micro black holes" (it is predicted that they will be created in upcoming particle accelerators) will evaporate very quickly. Big black holes will evaporate slowly at first, but then faster and faster as they shrink, until they get very small and release the last of their energy, in some sort of burst, yes. However a fundamental, unanswered, question is whether the radiation being emitted by the black hole contains 'information' about the states of things that went into the black hole. No one knows for sure. The conventional answer was that any information that goes into a black hole is lost forever.

      However to many scientists, this answer was unsatisfactory.

    22. Re:I'm confused by kestasjk · · Score: 1

      Thanks, I can't wait to learn about this stuff when I get past Physics 101

      --
      // MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
    23. Re:I'm confused by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Photons traveling towards the edge of the universe know more about the size of the universe than we ever could.

      So yes, that is information loss. So is entropy.

    24. Re:I'm confused by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      All you are really saying is that if they make a black hole the CERN campus won't get sucked in immediately. Over time, as the black hole absorbs more and more matter from the air around it then eventually it will have enough mass to suck in the CERN campus.

      That is unless it 'evaporates' first. It's only a matter of time until we do something stupid that really does cause a planet-wide chain reaction (or locks up the Earth Simulator we are running in...).

    25. Re:I'm confused by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      >why must information be preserved

      IMO this is a canard. Can you reconstruct a dinosaur from its bones? No. The preservation of information seems to be a half-cocked idea. Useful, maybe, but far from precise. Especially in the context of quantum mechanics (i.e. the unknowable) and entropy (i.e. the destruction of information).

      >does this mean that after evaporating enough matter black holes would burst back out and let all the stuff they captured back out?

      Time is an illusion. Light beams don't know the concept of "after." Quite literally, they have all the time in the world.

    26. Re:I'm confused by mshurpik · · Score: 1

      >They seem to be saying that new black holes cannot form.

      Yes, I read the article, and I think this part of it is b.s. All black holes existed since the beginning...uh??? What about, you know, space, and time, and all that? I seriously doubt that black holes were pre-fabbed like houses.

      >Somewhere there is a contradiction. Can somebody explain?

      I think they just took it one step too far.

    27. Re:I'm confused by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So, if the matter never reaches the event horizon, then it could always be pulled out (given sufficient force). Suppose something is falling into a black hole, but takes an infinite amount of time to do so. Then, anytime later, a "larger" black hole passing very close by could, conceivably, rip out some of the falling matter and sling some of it into space, right?

    28. Re:I'm confused by miskatonic+alumnus · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Not to start a flamewar or anything, but I would like to "put forth a slice of personal philosophy". Over the years I have come to be quite skeptical when I hear/read expressions like "infinite amount of time" and "arbitrarily close" as they relate to the real world (or our interpretation of it) rather than a purely theoretical treatment. Take for instance Newton's Law of Cooling which implies that your Betty Crocker brownies will take an infinite amount of time to reach room temperature after removing them from the oven. Or that the magnitude of the electric field near a point charge "grows arbitrarily large" as you get "arbitrarily close" to it. As a mathematician, I love infinity, I really do --- there are infinitely many of them to choose from! But, IMHO, they don't belong in models of the physical universe (apart from simplifying calculations such as integrals over R^3). I don't believe that time is of infinite duration, that space is without bound, or that either one is infinitely subdivisible. Matter and energy are quantized, why not space and time? It has a nice symmetry to it --- a fan favorite for both mathematicians and physicists.

    29. Re:I'm confused by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So, in essence, the collapse of the black hole takes an infinite amount of time, during which time the black hole will evaporate via Hawking radiation.


      As if there was an anti-gravity force, opposing the collapse. Let me be the first to suggest that this is somehow related to what we call "dark energy". But IANAP.
    30. Re:I'm confused by Pfhorrest · · Score: 1

      But a black hole is time-asymmetric. In one direction, information is irrevocably lost, whereas if you run the equations backwards, information is spontaneously created... which makes no sense (mathematically) because you don't know what information to put in there!

      I'm curious: why not just put random information in there? There's effectively random information coming out of the black hole as it 'evaporates' over forward time, so what's wrong with having random particles 'fall out of' a black hole (so to speak) when you play the model backwards?

      I seem to recall from somewhere that, quantum mechanically speaking, the past is just as indeterminate as the future, as any number of slightly different recent pasts could have lead to a present indistinguishable from this one. E.g. right now, we have no way of knowing whether or not Proxima Centauri was destroyed by aliens within the past 4.22 years, for light (and thus information) from that place and time has not yet reached us; so the Proxima Centauri of moments less than 4.22 years ago (including the present) ought to be considered in an unobserved (and thus superimposed, undetermined) state, no? Those past events which have not yet had a chance to influence us could have occurred or not - there may or may not still be a Proxima Centauri out there right now - and the local present would be exactly the same.

      So, I see no problem with a mathematical model which, when played in one direction, takes what we consider to be fixed, determined inputs (objects falling into black holes, say), and sometimes spits out random outputs (particles 'evaporating' out of black holes), and when played backwards takes those previous outputs as fixed inputs, runs them through the calculations, and spits out random outputs that may or may not be the same as the inputs that we put in when we ran the model forward (e.g. different things fall out of the black hole when played backwards than fell into it going fowards; more probably random things resembling Hawking radiation rather than recognizable objects). It just implies that the past is as indeterminate as the future, which many people may be uncomfortable with, but hey, a lot of this stuff goes against "common sense".

      But you seem to know more about the technical details of this than me, so maybe there's some problem I've overlooked?

      As a sidenote, I'm also very fond of this approach as a solution to the puzzle of why entropy appears to be time-asymmetric. I understand it, these days entropic decay is taken to be a statistical effect rather than an inviolable law itself - i.e. it's simply VERY VERY unlikely for things to randomly come into a state of lower entropy, while it's quite likely that they will come into a state of higher entropy. Combine that with this indeterminism about the past, and then even running the model backward, you should see entropy increasing, even though that would be a different past than the one you started with when you first ran the model forward. But that's not a problem; that relation of states of affairs at different moments (higher entropy at an "earlier" time, lower entropy at a "later" one), when viewed "forward" ("earlier" to "later"), is merely one of those very exceedingly rare world-line segments where entropy momentarily decreased.

      As an even further aside, this was one of my favorite points of discussion in a philosophy of physics course I took once - if entropy can (but exceedingly rarely does) spontaneously decrease, then the whole question of how the universe got into a low-entropy state to begin with (the "why" question behind the Big Bang) can be done away with if you just drop the assumption that time is finite. Metaphorically speaking, one day in the eternal pond that is the universe, an incredibly unlikely (but possible) even occurred, and some ripples and compression waves got together, lifted a pebble off the bed of the pond and spit it into the air; at which point it came crashing back down and made a nice big splash, the waves of

      --
      -Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
      "I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
    31. Re:I'm confused by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So, I see no problem with a mathematical model which, when played in one direction, takes what we consider to be fixed, determined inputs (objects falling into black holes, say), and sometimes spits out random outputs (particles 'evaporating' out of black holes), and when played backwards takes those previous outputs as fixed inputs, runs them through the calculations, and spits out random outputs that may or may not be the same as the inputs that we put in when we ran the model forward (e.g. different things fall out of the black hole when played backwards than fell into it going fowards; more probably random things resembling Hawking radiation rather than recognizable objects). It just implies that the past is as indeterminate as the future, which many people may be uncomfortable with, but hey, a lot of this stuff goes against "common sense". So the universe is encrypted?
    32. Re:I'm confused by cyclomedia · · Score: 1

      You park your car in the countryside and consult the map, 1km away is what looks like a good picnic spot. So you haul your kit out of the car and set off.

      However the 2d map doesnt show the 3d reality of the ground and there is actually a mountain between you and the picnic spot. So instead of it taking you 20 mins to walk there it actually takes you over an hour. Despite the fact that you're walking at a leisurly 3km/hour a lot of that effort is being translated into a vertical displacement and your actual horizontal movement across the Earth's surface suffers.

      Now, instead of a 2d-map vs a 3d-mountain you need to think about a 3d-universe vs a 4d-curvature-of-time. Instead of a physical displacement (the vertical axis of the mountain) which is easily observable to our 3d vision there's a temporal displacement, which we can only observe as a slowdown* in time.

      * or speedup, depending on who's observing who

      --
      If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
    33. Re:I'm confused by ribuck · · Score: 1

      Big black holes will evaporate slowly at first, but then faster and faster as they shrink, until they get very small and release the last of their energy, in some sort of burst, yes.
      As the next "big bang", in other words.
    34. Re:I'm confused by Magada · · Score: 1

      (Although for material objects, they will have been crushed and distorted beyond recognition. This may be a stupid question, but... Is this matter compressed from its own frame of reference, or just from ours? It's something I've never quite understood.
      --
      Something bad is coming when people are suddenly anxious to tell the truth.
    35. Re:I'm confused by madcow_bg · · Score: 1

      All you are really saying is that if they make a black hole the CERN campus won't get sucked in immediately. Over time, as the black hole absorbs more and more matter from the air around it then eventually it will have enough mass to suck in the CERN campus.

      That is unless it 'evaporates' first. It's only a matter of time until we do something stupid that really does cause a planet-wide chain reaction (or locks up the Earth Simulator we are running in...). Yes, you're right, we have started it already - Global Warming. Anyway, the black hole at CERN will be like 1/100 the size of an atomic nucleus, how is is supposed to eat up one? Even better, it is going to evaporate almost instantaneously, because the smaller they are, the faster they disappear due to Hawking radiation.
    36. Re:I'm confused by kickedfortrolling · · Score: 1

      Presumably we could use the non-thermal output of the CERN/BH interaction to get results from their continued experiments.

      The search for the Higgs seems to have taken forever, could that suggest CERN has already falled victim?

      --
      --AlexC
      Just because I dont agree with climate change doesnt make me a troll
    37. Re:I'm confused by zero_offset · · Score: 1

      IMO this is a canard. Can you reconstruct a dinosaur from its bones? No. The preservation of information seems to be a half-cocked idea.

      Your examples aren't especially relevant or accurate. You can't reconstruct a dinosaur from it's bones because the bones are only a small fraction of the information you'd need. It's a theoretical concept, not one with large-scale practical applicability like you describe. In theory you COULD reconstruct a dinosaur, but you'd need "perfect information" -- all the details of EVERYTHING that is remotely related to the dinosaur for the point in time at which you wished to reconstruct it. That information isn't lost in the universal sense, though it isn't available to you or me, and we clearly lack the know-how to recover it.

      Consider a less esoteric example: computer forensics. If I blasted a hard drive with a powerful electromagnet, I wouldn't know where to start to reconstruct that information. From my point of view, it seems ridiculous to assume that the information wasn't lost. But as you well know, it's recoverable. Assuming the contents of the drive were believed to be sufficiently important to warrant the effort, the FBI could probably recover the original contents. The information wasn't lost, it was just altered or scrambled.

      The parallels aren't exact, but from the point of view of a physicist, the information is still out there, we just lack the "forensic know-how" to reconstruct it.

      Furthermore, from this, we can draw the obvious conclusion: black holes are actually hide-outs for hacker terrorists wanted by the FBI.

      --

      Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005

    38. Re:I'm confused by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Well if you had two traditional black holes sailing past one another, then a particle caught within one event horizon won't be able to escape that event horizon, even if a larger black hole comes nearby. However what if the event horizon of the larger black hole actually crosses the event horizon of the smaller black hole... which event horizon does the particle end up being trapped by? I'm pretty sure the answer is: both. If the two event horizons were overlapped, then the two black holes would be so close that they could never overcome one another's gravity. They would be forced to coalesce into a single black hole. (You could postulate that the black holes had high initial velocities to try and overcome this... but I'm pretty sure that if you do a full treatment including all relativistic effects, you won't be able to escape the fact that the two black holes will simply merge.) If some matter gets close to the event horizon, but never actually crosses it, then yes it could be stolen-away by another black hole.

    39. Re:I'm confused by TheEmpyrean · · Score: 1

      this is why I know I need more coffee. All this talk about black holes, and then suddenly I read what I think is "Large Hard-on Collider" and I just involuntarily spray coffee all over my computer screen again.

    40. Re:I'm confused by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Both. The infalling object will certainly measure very high gravitational fields, and experience tidal forces, graviational gradients, etc. It will be crushed and stretched and smeared from its perspective.

      An outside observer will also see it be crushed by the high gravity (and gravitational gradients). These (unpleasant) gravity effects would set in before the time-dilation effects took over. For instance, falling towards a neutron star would also crush/destroy most objects... and neutron stars don't even have event horizons!

    41. Re:I'm confused by kebes · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I'm curious: why not just put random information in there? There's effectively random information coming out of the black hole as it 'evaporates' over forward time, so what's wrong with having random particles 'fall out of' a black hole (so to speak) when you play the model backwards?

      Indeed. That would solve the short-term mathematical problem, but not the deeper mismatch of the theories. Also, whether or not Hawking radiation is truly random, or whether it contains hidden information (in a non-trivially chaotic way, mind you) is the central question that people are trying to answer. It's an unsolved problem. Your suggestion would probably get the "right answer" for any real-life measurement we're going to make on black holes anytime soon. But the math may be hinting that there is an underlying physical principle we've been ignoring thus far. This is what has physicists excited: the possibility that this hint may lead to another revolution in our understanding of the universe.

      I see no problem with a mathematical model which, when played in one direction, takes what we consider to be fixed, determined inputs ... and sometimes spits out random outputs ... and when played backwards takes those previous outputs as fixed inputs, runs them through the calculations, and spits out random outputs that may or may not be the same as the inputs that we put in when we ran the model forward

      I see where you're coming from. We can't know whether the universe is fundamentally 'supposed' to be time-symmetric or time-asymmetric. So maybe the universe is ruled by equations of the sort you describe. However the really troubling thing is this: all the fundamental equations of physics are time-symmetric. These are the equations that are used to predict and model the existence of black holes. So it's really weird that time-symmetric equations predict the emergence of a time-asymmetric phenomenon. (If you have equations that don't differentiate between left and right, it would be surely astonishing if, after some algebra, the equation had a preference for left or right. Where did the preference come from? You probably made a mistake in your algebra!) The idea of time-symmetry suddenly being broken is tantalizing. It suggests that either we have a hidden assumption in our current models, or that the universe is really able to generate time-asymmetry from time-symmetric forces. Either realization, if proven, would be an important contribution to physics. So I guess it again comes down to physicists not just being uncomfortable with the inelegance of the current formalism, but also hoping that the resolution of this paradox will provide new insights.

      I'm also very fond of this approach as a solution to the puzzle of why entropy appears to be time-asymmetric.

      Since my background is in chemistry, I also tend to think of the problem in terms of entropy. In which case, to a large extent the emergence of time-asymmetry just amounts to the axiom "the universe started in a low-entropy state" after which statistical mechanics nicely predicts all the phenomena we readily observe. (The viewpoint you describe, where given enough time the universe will simply wander into a low-entropy state, is actually quite compelling.) But that actually makes the black holes all the more tantalizing. Because in statistical mechanics, as you noted, even when you go into high-entropy states, you are not really destroying information. All systems can, in principle, return to previous (even low-entropy) states. (In fact there are equations that allow you to approximate what the 'recurrence time' for a given system will be... where eventually it will return to its initial condition, even if it is a highly-ordered state.) However in a universe with black holes destroying information, this no longer holds true. If you follow the 'information' in such a un

    42. Re:I'm confused by aminorex · · Score: 1

      Matter and energy are only quantized because they are fundamentally (as intelligible objects of perception) information events, and information is necessarily quantized. Without the epistemic effects of an observer in the underlying model, there may be no need of quantization in physics: The discretization effects which quantum theory predicts could be explicable as harmonic nodes of a Lagrangian system, and the continuity of the model be thus preserved.

      Besides which, renormalization theory requires an infinite regress of entities in order to explain the quantum, so I don't think you're escaping physically real infinities by resort to a quantum theory.

      --
      -I like my women like I like my tea: green-
    43. Re:I'm confused by UnknownSoldier · · Score: 1

      > Matter and energy are quantized, why not space and time? It has a nice symmetry to it --- a fan favorite for both mathematicians and physicists.

      They are -- the universe is digital. Everything single "thing" has a frequency, and thus quantized.

      You'll want to ready Dewry Larson's Recipal Systems. Specifically, "The Fundamental Postulates" of The Structure of the Physical Universe.

      Cheers

      --
      Religion & Science will remain woefully incomplete until they pursue the knowledge of what happens before Life, and after Death.

    44. Re:I'm confused by kalirion · · Score: 1

      That is unless it 'evaporates' first. It's only a matter of time until we do something stupid that really does cause a planet-wide chain reaction (or locks up the Earth Simulator we are running in...).

      Ah, I see, so God's true name is the equivalent of a CTRL-ALT-DEL?

    45. Re:I'm confused by Pfhorrest · · Score: 1

      However in a universe with black holes destroying information, this no longer holds true. If you follow the 'information' in such a universe, it will decrease every time a black hole absorbs something. So if the universe ever spontaneously reaches a low-entropy state again, then you have to ask "where did all this new information come from?"

      Isn't the information of the (lets assume) random Hawking radiation "new" information, in that it is (if not in some way determined by what falls into the black hole) randomly generated? So that random new information could randomly be the same information that fell into the black hole. Of course I suppose it's possible that some information falls into a black hole and the black hole evaporates before ever randomly outputting the lost data; but then, in some other possible world, it did randomly radiate out the same information that fell into it. Perhaps this is something like what Hawking's own proposed solution was? (Information is conserved across all possible worlds even if not within any given one).

      --
      -Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
      "I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
    46. Re:I'm confused by Pfhorrest · · Score: 1

      I see where you're coming from. We can't know whether the universe is fundamentally 'supposed' to be time-symmetric or time-asymmetric. So maybe the universe is ruled by equations of the sort you describe. However the really troubling thing is this: all the fundamental equations of physics are time-symmetric. These are the equations that are used to predict and model the existence of black holes. So it's really weird that time-symmetric equations predict the emergence of a time-asymmetric phenomenon.

      I didn't quite grok what the relevance of the second sentence here was when I read it through the first time, but now it strikes me, I may be thinking of time symmetry differently than it's meant to be used (presuming your usage, which now seems to differ from mine, is the correct one). I was thinking that you could have the laws be "time symmetric" if you were OK with the idea of 'rewinding' to different pasts than you came from, by which I meant that you could say that the math applies fine in both directions so long as that counterintuitive consequence doesn't upset you. But now it dawns on my that your (I presume correct) use of "time symmetric" seems to be that when you play the model fowards and backwards and forwards and backwards and forward again, you replay over the exact same events; and thus interpreted me "why can't it be this way?" question as "what's wrong with time asymmetry?", when I meant it as "why isn't this 'time symmetric'" (in my misunderstood sense, i.e. "why can't you apply these equations backwards time? So what if it gets you a different past than you started with?")

      So now with that lightbulb on in my head, I have another question for you, which as a chemist is probably more in your ballpark: are quantum laws, e.g. governing radioactive decay, time-asymmetric in precisely the same way that a black hole is, but in reverse? For if you play the model backwards, say, un-decaying a C-12 atom back to a C-14 atom, don't you lose information? Namely, the information about whether or not the C-14 will in fact decay to C-12 in the next moment; which information, in forward time, does not exist until the event actually occurs or not. If that's so, then this seems to suggest even more strongly the hypothesis (which may be Hawking's proposed solution to the black hole paradox?) that information is not conserved within any given possible world, but only within the set of all possible worlds. Also c.f. quantum wave functions of unobserved systems being deterministic, and thus time-symmetric and information preserving, while the wave collapse of observed systems is indeterministic and thus (?) time-asymmetric and information-creating. Or am I misunderstanding something here about what counts as the creation of information?

      --
      -Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
      "I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
    47. Re:I'm confused by kebes · · Score: 1

      your use of "time symmetric" seems to be that when you play the model fowards and backwards and forwards and backwards and forward again, you replay over the exact same events

      Yes that's what I mean by time-symmetry (I believe that's the accepted usage). Sorry for the confusion. Also, I was glossing over perhaps too much. For instance I was mostly referring to the more classical physics equations (even though I mixed in quantum arguments). E.g. the equations of mechanics, electromagnetism, and gravity are all time-symmetric (as you say, you can run them forwards and backwards and keep getting the same states). In the standard model, mechanics, electromagnetism, gravity, and the strong nuclear force are all time-symmetric. However, there is a small (but experimentally verified) violation of time symmetry in the weak nuclear force (called CP violation). So, really, the fundamental laws are known to be time-asymmetric... but it's still strange that you can construct a theory of black holes using just general relativity (no quantum mechanics, no time-symmetry violations). Actually CP-violation (and the whole discussion of CPT symmetries) is an incredible topic on its own.

      are quantum laws, e.g. governing radioactive decay, time-asymmetric in precisely the same way that a black hole is, but in reverse?

      Yeah I was hoping you wouldn't ask that! You're absolutely right... Quantum mechanics is divided into two regimes: (1) the deterministic, gradual, time-symmetric evolution of a system's wavefunction (regulated by the Schrodinger equation) and then (2) a sudden, non-deterministic (in fact, totally random) time-asymmetric change that occurs when a systems undergoes 'wavefunction collapse.' This time-asymmetry is actually the more troubling example of the universe not being time-symmetric (with, as you point out, information basically appearing out of nowhere). This process (2) has bothered physicists since it was introduced, since it didn't have clear rules and no equation was available for it.

      Answering the questions "what causes wavefunction collapse?" and "is wavefunction collapse deterministic?" is not easy. The short answer is that it is an unsolved problem. We know that quantum mechanics leads to random events as seen by local observers, however we don't yet know whether quantum mechanics is, fundamentally, deterministic or non-deterministic (time-symmetric vs. time-asymmetric). However a lot of progress has been made on this topic in the last few decades, and unfortunately these results have not been picked up by most popular science sources that I've seen. (So, annoyingly, the version of quantum mechanics presented in most books is still "the old version", unaltered by all the recent experimental and theoretical advances.) One of the recent advances is analysis of decoherence. It explains why wavefunction collapse occurs, under what conditions it will occur, and why the final states will seem to be classical non-quantum states. In brief summary, the idea in decoherence is that when a quantum system (which could be in a superposition of states) starts becoming entangled with the 'environment' (i.e. the innumerable degrees of freedom of nearby atoms, air molecules, thermal radiation, etc.), this causes the system to lose quantum coherence between its constituent states. That is the system goes from being in a coherent superposition (the quantum states that are usually described as "a simultaneous mix of up and down" or whatever) to being in an incoherent mix of states (like "up or down, but we don't know which one). Thus the environment takes on the role of persistently monitoring the system, thereby inducing wavefunction collapse quite rapidly for nearly every system. So that's why, even though quantum superpositions occur all the time, they decohere quickly and frequently, and we see mostly classical stat

    48. Re:I'm confused by Pfhorrest · · Score: 1

      Interestingly enough, though I'm in no way a physicist myself - I was, until this past weekends commencement, a philosophy student - I've heard talk of something like decoherence in an assortment of philosophy classes before, so the new stuff is getting out there to schools, just in unlikely places it seems. I'm a fan of modal realism myself (i.e. all possible worlds are equally real), so I don't have problems with indeterminism in the local world so long as the "multiverse" (i.e. the superposition of all possible worlds) is deterministic. Though I don't think it was mentioned by the name decoherence specifically, we've discussed in class the idea that wavefunction collapse upon observation is in fact the opposite: the observer enters a superposed state along with the observed system, simultaneously "observing the system collapse" in every possible way at once, in effect creating multiple "copies" of the observer in alternate "universes", each of which observes a different collapse of the observed system. Of course, examining the wavefunction of the complete universe you wouldn't see it this way; you'd just see the superimposition of histories wherein the observer and the observed system interacted in various ways, and the evolution of that universal wavefunction would, like any other, be completely deterministic.

      One thing I don't get, though, which you sort of raised in your discussion of decoherence, is that if if it's really all a question of information transmission, and everything is constantly interacting with everything else (i.e. everything is constantly "observing" everything else), then shouldn't all events within our light cone be "collapsed" already, whether or not we've gone about making any measurements? So how is it that we can say some particle over there in the lab is presently in a superposed state, when by the time we've finished saying such a thing, everything interacting with the particle has been conveying information to us (whether or not we're conscious of it) at the speed of light? Is it perhaps precisely the fact that the only systems wherein we observe (so to speak) this superposition of unobserved systems are the very conveyors of information (e.g. photons) themselves, which allows them to be within our light cone and yet still not have conveyed any information to us? As in, what is there to tell us about the state of some photon flying by, except for something intercepting that photon and sending some more photons our way to let us know what it was doing?

      Anyway... I've sort of lost my train of thought in here somewhere. Thank you for an interesting conversation. I feel sorry for the other states of myself which never got to entangle with such states of yourself :-)

      --
      -Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
      "I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
    49. Re:I'm confused by kebes · · Score: 1

      I've heard talk of something like decoherence in an assortment of philosophy classes before
      That's good to hear! I have a friend who got a philosophy degree, and he was not nearly as well-versed in the philosophy and interpretation of quantum mechanics and thermodynamics as you obviously are.

      I don't have problems with indeterminism in the local world so long as the "multiverse" (i.e. the superposition of all possible worlds) is deterministic
      Part of me really wants to believe that the universe is ultimately deterministic, since that seems most 'elegant.' However I know this isn't very rational and that we must accept indeterminism if that's the way the universe really works. Like many, I find the many-worlds interpretation somehow compelling, yet as a scientist it is difficult to endorse an interpretation for which there is no experimental evidence. (Although some have claimed that we should be able to measure interference effects between different states of the global superposition of the multiverse, most analysis suggests that we can never obtain evidence of these 'other worlds.')

      if it's really all a question of information transmission, and everything is constantly interacting with everything else (i.e. everything is constantly "observing" everything else), then shouldn't all events within our light cone be "collapsed" already, whether or not we've gone about making any measurements?
      Well decoherence allows us to calculate what 'degree of entanglement' with the environment is necessary to cause a superposition to apparently collapse. If you imagine an atom in a vacuum, millions of years from anything else, then it's not hard to imagine that it will remain in a superposition for a long time. If you imagine a cat sitting in a box, it turns out that any superposition it enters will collapse in less than 1E-80 seconds, because of all the air molecules hitting it, etc. And of course there are many examples in between.

      In fact they did a neat experiment with a beam of buckyballs. These spherical molecules are big enough that they decohere rapidly in some cases, but small enough that you can get them into superpositions sometimes. They found that the beam exhibited quantum interference effects when the constituent buckyballs were at low temperature, but that the beam lost that quantum effect when the beam was hotter. The effect matched decoherence predictions perfectly. If the bucykballs (in vacuum) are cold enough, they can maintain a coherent superposition for the duration of the experiment (a few seconds), whereas if they are too hot, they begin interacting with the environment (via emitting thermal radiation that is entangled with them, and becomes entangled with the sidewalls of the experimental chamber, etc.) and lose coherence before hitting the detector.

      So it's easy to imagine that an atomic nucleus, which is insulated from most interactions, can maintain a state of 'decayed and not decayed' for a reasonably long time, or that a single electron can interfere with itself. However it's clearly not reasonable to say that a cat will exist in a superposition for any meaningful amount of time, because large, hot objects become entangled with their environment very quickly. So I believe the answer is: somethings will exhibit superpositions (which collapse when they become sufficiently entangled with the environment, i.e. they are measured) and other things cannot really get into superpositions (because they collapse effectively instantaneously).

      Thank you for an interesting conversation.
      Thank you too! It's always nice to have a real conversation on slashdot (amid all the trolls and rants)!
  7. I should probably RTFM, but... by drawfour · · Score: 1

    'from an external viewer's point it takes an infinite amount of time to form an event horizon and that the clock for the objects falling into the black hole appears to slow down to zero,' Huh? Does that mean that since we're external viewers, no black hole that we "view" will have an event horizon, because it takes an infinite amount of time to form?
    1. Re:I should probably RTFM, but... by Poromenos1 · · Score: 1

      You should RTFM, this is clearly stated in section 2.1, "Black hole event horizon formation"!

      --
      Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
    2. Re:I should probably RTFM, but... by bwcbwc · · Score: 1

      ...or that all the black holes in the universe had already established their event horizons before the laws of relativity became valid. In other words, before or very shortly after the big bang/blowup.

      --
      We are the 198 proof..
    3. Re:I should probably RTFM, but... by kickedfortrolling · · Score: 1

      To what extent can the article be used as a manual?

      --
      --AlexC
      Just because I dont agree with climate change doesnt make me a troll
  8. data recovery ad by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    "We can recover data from hard disks that were crushed, burnt, smashed, or thrown in a black hole!"

    1. Re:data recovery ad by Adambomb · · Score: 1

      "...in 0 time at all!"

      --
      Ice Cream has no bones.
  9. Experiment by Rosco+P.+Coltrane · · Score: 4, Funny

    from an external viewer's point it takes an infinite amount of time to form an event horizon

    Nothing like an experiment to verify theories. And indeed, a quick trip to the DMV or the social security office confirms that it does seem to take an infinite amount of time for any event to occur, and that the clock seems to stop locally.

    See? no need for black holes.

    --
    "A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
    1. Re:Experiment by Gazzonyx · · Score: 1

      from an external viewer's point it takes an infinite amount of time to form an event horizon

      Nothing like an experiment to verify theories. And indeed, a quick trip to the DMV or the social security office confirms that it does seem to take an infinite amount of time for any event to occur, and that the clock seems to stop locally.

      See? no need for black holes. Yeah, but time, from the perspective of outside said offices, seems to speed up such that right after leaving the DMV it's time to go back again. This applies for jury duty, as well. I feel a GUT coming on...
      --

      If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.

  10. My Name is Feces ...... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Promounced 'FECKese' for those who were wondering...

    EOL

  11. If an event horizon takes infinite amout of time by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    If an event horizon takes an infinite amout of time to form what are all these things we think are black holes? We think we see them sucking matter and emitting jets. How did they get their event horizons? Is the Universe infinitely old? Are they?

    Sorry if this is a dumb question, but I am not an astrophysicst.

  12. Hawking's solution by EvilGrin5000 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Anyone know what happened to Hawking's proposal for information loss?

    Basically what Hawking said (in a late essay entry in a science conference) was that Black Holes do 'digest' information and therefore you have information loss, however (and this is where his proposal was a bit controversial) Hawking suggested that the conglomeration of parallel universes will have a particular Black Hole present in one, and the same Black Hole missing in another, therefore the TOTAL information for ALL Universes, is retained.

    Here's a link to Hawking's Black Hole Paradox: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_informatio n_paradox

    And from the wiki article, here's the line I'm mentioning in my post:

    "...On October 28, 2006, The Discovery Channel aired a show called "The Hawking Paradox". The show explained Hawking's conclusion that one must look at the universe as a whole, and that information lost in black holes is saved in parallel universes where no black holes exist."

    It seems that this new solution is completely disregarding Hawking's proposal and replacing it with a new, stretched solution.

    --
    A black cat crossing your path signifies that the animal is going somewhere. -- Groucho Marx
    1. Re:Hawking's solution by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You mean "it seems that the new solution follows from plain general relativity, an upgrade from Hawking's proposal which required that we assume the existence of parallel universes."

    2. Re:Hawking's solution by TexVex · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Parallel universes that only exist on paper or in the minds of quantum physicists are such a copout. You can't detect them, measure them, interact with them, or otherwise find any way to prove they exist, yet some people believe in them anyway. Kinda like God.

      --
      Fun with Anagarams! LADS HOST, SHALT DOS. HAS DOLTS. AD SLOTHS, HATS SOLD. ASS HO, LTD.
    3. Re:Hawking's solution by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The show explained Hawking's conclusion that one must look at the universe as a whole, and that information lost in black holes is saved in parallel universes where no black holes exist

      That doesn't cut it though... if you want to take all of the "parallel universes" as a whole, then there must also be a second copy of that information in the "parallel universe", so when it's destroyed in our universe, it goes from having two copies of the information to one copy. Or is he saying that as long as in some parallel dimension there is still at least one copy of the information remaining, it's fine to destroy it willy-nilly? How does the information know it's the last remaining copy, and what happens if the last surviving copy of the information then falls into a completely different black hole that only existed in that universe? Or is this interpretation entirely wrong, and when the information falls into our black hole, it appears in another parallel universe where it did not exist at all prior to that event?

      Frankly, Hawking's parallel universe explanation is a bit harder to swallow than the infinite time compression proposition, which itself seems to be a special-relativity flavor of Zeno's paradox.

    4. Re:Hawking's solution by emptybody · · Score: 1

      I have been listening to the Walter Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe.
      (obligitory amazon link -> Einstein: His Life and Universe )

      This new theory fits easily.
      CD7 tracks 6 and 7 talk about information transforming based on frame of refere4nce but still staying the same.
      CD9 track 2 starts to bring up descriptions of the universe and time and defines a black hole and describes time dialation. the author makes a callout to the 60s and Hawking.
      CD9 track 3 goes into some detail of how Einsteins relativity theory fits so well.

      --
      comment directly in my journal
    5. Re:Hawking's solution by SoCalEd · · Score: 1

      Can a parallel universe which is missing a black hole here and there, and therefore missing all of the information which ever dumped into them, really be said to be parallel? Maybe I can find a way to sing that to the tune of Eric The Half A Bee...

      --
      Insert witty comment *here*. I'm fresh out of wit...
    6. Re:Hawking's solution by honkycat · · Score: 1

      You're making it harder than it needs to be. The idea with that sort of parallel universe is that it's something our universe doesn't normally interact with, but is part of the same physics and thermodynamic accounting. Since the universes don't interact other than inside black holes, we normally consider energy, entropy, etc, to be conserved purely within our own observable universe. Inside the black holes, the idea goes, energy/information/entropy can be exchanged between the universes. Once that interaction takes place, each individual universe no longer needs to conserve these thermodynamic quantities, but anything "missing" from one must appear in the other.

      Basically, in this view, thermodynamics is still right. Information/entropy is conserved. However, what we think of as the universe is not the whole system, so it can appear that it's leaving our universe by going to a mostly disconnected other universe.

      Anyway, there are lots of ideas about this sort of thing with all sorts of wrinkles. They're all pretty distasteful scientifically unless we find a way to probe these other universes. From reading the article (but not the whole paper), this approach would be much more satisfying if it stands up, since it might be testable given our current physics. Not testable by waiting for infinity, of course, but since it doesn't rely on some unknown physics connecting us to the alternate universe, we can work out its predictions using what we know already. That may suggest experiments to be done in finite time that would test the theory.

    7. Re:Hawking's solution by TexVex · · Score: 1

      Can a parallel universe which is missing a black hole here and there, and therefore missing all of the information which ever dumped into them, really be said to be parallel?
      I've got it! The mass from the missing black holes can be found in the goatees on all the evil parallel twins.
      --
      Fun with Anagarams! LADS HOST, SHALT DOS. HAS DOLTS. AD SLOTHS, HATS SOLD. ASS HO, LTD.
    8. Re: Hawking's solution by Black+Parrot · · Score: 1

      Anyone know what happened to Hawking's proposal for information loss? Isn't it merely supposition that information can't be lost? A desire for a neat and orderly universe, which once drove the (now abandoned?) notion that the curvature of the universe is "just right"?
      --
      Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
    9. Re:Hawking's solution by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I actually watched "The Hawking Paradox" when they aired it and according to that show, the theory in this story (or one that sounds very much like it) predates Hawking's. Furthermore, according to my memory of the show, it's not that that particular black hole does not exist in other universes, but rather that there exist universes with no black holes. Universes that contain black holes will eventually have all their information destroyed and disappear, leaving only those without them. (IOW, we are doomed in yet another way, because our universe contains black holes.)

    10. Re:Hawking's solution by Intrinsic · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Parallel universes that only exist on paper or in the minds of quantum physicists are such a copout. You can't detect them, measure them, interact with them, or otherwise find any way to prove they exist, yet some people believe in them anyway. Kinda like God.


      Ohh boy... isnt that like saying the world was flat back in the middle ages? Yet some people the world believe the world is round, sounds good on paper, but really since we cant detect that it its probabley just a belief anyway..

    11. Re:Hawking's solution by ChuckleBug · · Score: 1

      Ohh boy... isnt that like saying the world was flat back in the middle ages? Yet some people the world believe the world is round, sounds good on paper, but really since we cant detect that it its probabley just a belief anyway..

      No, because the information in other universes is undetectable in principle, whereas determining the geometry of Earth is, in principle and reality, possible.

    12. Re:Hawking's solution by foniksonik · · Score: 1

      Except that most people who believe in God also believe that He/She/It is in effect and affect, the Universe itself (or parallel universes if you must) and so avoid that question altogether by saying "God is all around you and YOU, you can't NOT interact, detect and measure Him, it's essentially the only thing you can do."

      Only children (and aetheists apparently) think of God as a big guy in the clouds or even as a separate entity from the Universe... and only because they have limited ability to think in abstractions at early ages and then it's just easier/better to let them figure it out for themselves as they mature and learn to think for themselves (unfortunately some never do figure it out).

      The rest of us know that God == Universe but God !== Universe in the same way that a Light Wave == Light Photon but a Light Wave !== Light Photon

      So they are equal but not identical, which is a similar concept to parallel universes coincidentally.

      In any case the proof is in the relationships between the data points, not the data points themselves... it's like how an algorithm can describe or determine the behavior of a dynamic data set but is not identical to that data set.

      You'd think that more people could make this connection regarding God and Universe, etc.... but it must be harder than I realize.

      --
      A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
    13. Re:Hawking's solution by loqi · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Yeah, it's so obvious that it can't even be put into a coherent explanation.

      --
      If other reasons we do lack, we swear no one will die when we attack
    14. Re:Hawking's solution by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If you have a better explanation or model, write a paper and publish it. It's a better use of your time than snobbery on slashdot.

    15. Re:Hawking's solution by trentblase · · Score: 1

      I like your ideas. You should put them on a website and call it "God Cube".

    16. Re:Hawking's solution by The+One+and+Only · · Score: 1

      What you're describing is pantheism, which is specifically rejected by most religious faiths.

      --
      In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
    17. Re:Hawking's solution by CubicleView · · Score: 1

      I can assure you, the religion I was fed in school is quite clear on he/she/it being an old beardy guy who resides quite apart from the universe the rest of us are sharing. Even stretching this, it seems to me at any rate, that the dogma has a fairly specific "God" entity. As an aside, if you must preach to us child like types (and I wish you wouldn't), you should at least spell atheist correctly.

    18. Re:Hawking's solution by nine-times · · Score: 1

      It seems that this new solution is completely disregarding Hawking's proposal and replacing it with a new, stretched solution.

      Don't worry. If there's no information loss in the universe, then Hawking's proposal won't disappear.

    19. Re:Hawking's solution by aminorex · · Score: 1

      You can't detect, measure, or interact with a lot of things in the ordinary universe, using current technologies, but that does not mean that they don't exist, or that it is not wise to believe in them. What the last time you tasted your own liver? Yet, if you swallow 500 acetominophen tablets, it will kill you just as dead. The same is true of an aboriginal who doesn't know what a liver does or what acetominiphen is. Similarly, what is notional, fantastical, to you, Horatio, may be quite practical to another, at another time -- or, in the case of God, should she so choose, to you yourself, in another "place" and "time".

      --
      -I like my women like I like my tea: green-
    20. Re:Hawking's solution by foniksonik · · Score: 1
      What about the explanation was incoherent?

      I lost you somewhere... must have been at the beginning when you skipped to the reply button ;-p

      Here it is again for your reading pleasure:

      You can agree that light can be described as a wave or as a stream of photons, correct? This is the first part. That two things can be equal but not identical.

      Light waves are equal but not identical to Light photons.

      Here is the second part. First I'll include the definition of an algorithm:

      an algorithm is a finite list of well-defined instructions for accomplishing some task that, given an initial state, will terminate in a defined end-state

      - wikipedia:algorithm

      Now I'll ask you to discern whether or not, given enough information, the Universe could be described with an algorithm... as in it had a beginning state, it iterated itself through a number of permutations of interactions, like any good chemical reaction should... and eventually will terminate itself in what will be a defined end state of some sort.

      The analogy is that God is the algorithm, rather than the chemicals/elements... and yet this is the same relationship as light waves to photons, as in they are equal but not identical.

      The algorithm perfectly describes the chemical reaction which created the Universe as we know it but is not the chemical reaction itself.

      God/Algorithm is the beginning and the end... past/future, directs all things, created all things, is outside of us and part of us.

      --
      A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
    21. Re:Hawking's solution by ceoyoyo · · Score: 1

      Uh huh. Apparently you haven't talked to one of the majority of adherents to the big three religions who believe that God looks like a man, occasionally (or not so occasionally) takes a personal interest in what goes on, writes books and he or his equally supernatural angels has been known to (or will be known to) get into sword fights. He also listens to and answers prayers.

    22. Re:Hawking's solution by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Only children (and aetheists apparently) think of God as a big guy in the clouds or even as a separate entity from the Universe... first of all sorry for the AC, i had to give my points to some truly insightful ppl on this thread... you may find me here.

      as about your post, the above affirmation is wrong on so many levels that i can only start by asking if you are stupid or just like to pretend.

      first of all, ppl dont "think" of God, ppl Believe in God... and i wonder which part from atheist=NonBeliever you dont get when you state that atheists "think" of God?

      second ... the bearded-old-guy-God has NOTHING to do with the atheists... it is presented so by the bible ... and if you wanna find a group of ppl that "think" of God like that, leave the atheists alone and try the bible followers, the jesus-camps, etc...

      third ... your description of God is nothing new or special and pretty much every intelligent person i ever met had a similar one ... einstein presented it pretty good one century ago, way better than you did in your convoluted post .. he talked about God as the order and harmony of the universe, the governing-force of the universe, etc ... maybe you should study some of his "religious" writings and put some order in that dizzy head of yours ... also stop talkin about things you dont understand and stop putting your thoughts in other ppl' heads.
      and before presenting yourself as better than the "stupid & ugly atheists" maybe you should remember that according to the bible, your ideas about God will put you in the middle of the same witch-fire as the atheists.

      bye and good luck.

    23. Re:Hawking's solution by deuterium · · Score: 1

      Ok, but this makes God nothing more than a formalism, and isn't very compelling as a deity. Why bother praying to an indefinite abstraction?

      People want a discrete, volitional god.

    24. Re:Hawking's solution by foniksonik · · Score: 1

      I can assure you that I just spent a year in adult religious education to convert to Catholicism and never was an old beardy guy mentioned.

      What else did they teach you in school I wonder? Did they teach you an adult version of anything? Did you learn calculus or algebra? Did you learn the real history of the United States, complete with drug trade, slave trade and piracy which were the primary economy of the nation for 100 years? I suspect not.

      If you want to learn about the adult version of something you'll have to take an adult class. Ever take comparative theology in college?

      I'm not being preachy, just being argumentative.

      --
      A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
    25. Re:Hawking's solution by foniksonik · · Score: 1

      Did you just watch Dogma on TNT or something? or maybe Bruce Almighty? The various religions need to publish some updated press releases or something... obviously these people you're talking to went to Sunday school as a child and then never listened to anything in Church ever again.

      As an educated thoughtful individual I can say I stopped believing in God as Santa Claus when I stopped believing in Santa Claus... doesn't mean I stopped believing in God but now I have a more mature adult understanding of what God is, influenced by my mature adult understanding of math, science, physics, biology, statistics and psychology.

      You don't still think the Moon is made of cheese do you? or that making a wish when you blow out your candles on the birthday cake has any meaning? how about getting cooties from kissing? How about if you make a face for long enough it will stay that way?

      These are all things parents tell their kids and society reinforces with cartoons and books but they are basically lies meant to shelter children from hard facts about life and to foster their imagination at the same time. That doesn't mean you should hold on to them as an adult.

      The various religions may still teach God as Santa Claus to children and in regions where that is the only concept of religion the people have, but in modern societies the Religions teach Theology and Social Justice and how YOU are the hand of God and that we all together are his body.

      Ask any practicing Jew if God is an old bearded Jew... they'll laugh in your face.

      Ask a practicing Christian the same question, they'll probably ask you if you think He is and whether that is comforting or not... then they'll agree with your answer because they'll know that you aren't ready to learn the truth.

      --
      A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
    26. Re:Hawking's solution by foniksonik · · Score: 1

      Actually i've sidestepped pantheism with the statement that God !== Universe. You're correct that religion rejects pantheism... because it limits God to the material world.

      I'm saying that God is the material world AND the relationships that describe and influence the material world (which is best explained in terms of strange attractors which has to do with chaos theory and fractal geometries... there are built in tendencies for things to manifest in a particular way due to their inherent individual properties which interact with each other in pseudo predictable ways; as in hydrogen usually bonds with oxygen in a particular way but when another element is present may bond in another way, depending on the environment they are in, the relationships are the bonding patterns, not the elements themselves).

      Next you might say I'm describing Deism, ie: in the beginning there was the algorithm, the Word of God... and it determined all things, then God stopped and rested for eternity. That's not correct either but day to day it fits 99% of what we experience. The incorrect part of it is really that time/space is not predetermined and in us humans God has an agent for change, good and bad. So we have an impact on our Universe (and if we discover other intelligent self actualizing beings out there in space somewhere, it applies to them as well) which is the result of free will.

      Religion/Faith is supposed to give our free will a purpose, rather than just leave it up to random decisions or selfish desires for power and material wealth, it's the original government 'by the people, for the people' though of course like our own* democracy/republic it has had poor leaders and poor representatives. *I'm in the US

      Science and Religion should be working together for the improvement of human life and i sincerely believe it is the secular political powers that create divisiveness in order to maintain their power lead over both. "Science will turn us all into robots! Religion will turn us all into Sheep! Vote for me, I'll Manage them both objectively, don't forget to pay your taxes ;-p"

      --
      A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
    27. Re:Hawking's solution by ceoyoyo · · Score: 1

      Ah, you religious types are so confrontational.

      Hey, how do you like it? Your debating style sucks.

      Now, do you think it's possible that maybe you don't represent all religious people? Hm?

      It turns out I recently DID talk to a practicing Christian. She very much believes that the archangel Michael got into a very literal conflict with Lucifer. With swords.

      I think the fundamentalist Christian sects would have something to say about your interpretation too. Also the fundamentalist Muslims. All that Catholic talk about a personal relationship with Jesus doesn't sound very metaphorical either. Let's see, that would be a personal relationship with... nature? Yourself? I think the Catholic church is still pretty opposed to people having personal relationships with themselves. Something about a story in the bible about wasting seed or something.

    28. Re:Hawking's solution by loqi · · Score: 1

      You can agree that light can be described as a wave or as a stream of photons, correct?
      Yes.

      This is the first part. That two things can be equal but not identical.
      Whether or not that is the case, your example is not an instance of it. Particle and wave descriptions of light are just that, descriptions. Abstract concepts useful for understanding light's behavior. However, it's a huge leap to pin those individually incomplete descriptions to what light is, and claim that duality as a philosophical justification for an otherwise vague notion of equality vs identity.

      Light waves are equal but not identical to Light photons.
      Only in a purely semantic sense, because we're using a different nomenclature to describe them. One could describe a table in terms of its components' Schrödinger equations, or one could say that it's 100 years old and oak. Both descriptions are valid, but they refer to exactly the same conceptual object. There's no question of equality vs identity.

      Now I'll ask you to discern whether or not, given enough information, the Universe could be described with an algorithm... as in it had a beginning state, it iterated itself through a number of permutations of interactions, like any good chemical reaction should... and eventually will terminate itself in what will be a defined end state of some sort.
      If the universe actually can be described algorithmically, then any "chemicals" or "reactions" are figments of the algorithm itself, rather than its underlying substrate.

      The analogy is that God is the algorithm, rather than the chemicals/elements... and yet this is the same relationship as light waves to photons, as in they are equal but not identical.
      This is exactly the same as saying is the universe, rather than a subset of the universe. Which is a completely useless definition of "God"... just say universe.

      The algorithm perfectly describes the chemical reaction which created the Universe as we know it but is not the chemical reaction itself.
      The chemical reaction which created the universe? I'm not familiar with any even remotely accepted theory like that.

      Anyway, I'll try and extract the only coherent idea that I think you're hinting at, which is that information is conceptually separate from the substrate that encodes it, yet (seemingly) dependent on a substrate for existence. I don't think the conceptual space you're trying to carve out for the word "God" is meaningful, though, because any useful definition of "the universe" includes everything that can affect its state. If there is any kind of chemical reaction or computer program that "implements" the universe, its details are completely irrelevant and unknowable to us, because by definition they can never affect "reality". Furthermore, if you really believe in the distinction of encoded information from its substrate, and you accept the notion of universe-as-algorithm, the word "universe" occupies all of the memetic leg room you're trying to donate to "God".
      --
      If other reasons we do lack, we swear no one will die when we attack
    29. Re:Hawking's solution by CubicleView · · Score: 1

      I shouldn't encourage you, but I actually am a bit childish, so I'll respond one last time. As far as I'm concerned you were preaching. The parent post had a God joke tacked onto the end, whereas your entire "argument" seemed to me to be just to enlighten me and teach me the error of my child like atheist ways. The tone of your "argument" placed you above a significant proportion of the world, who you believe have somehow misunderstood their own faith (which pissed me off). Btw regarding my education, you're correct, I didn't learn anything overly specific about American history, just a little about your civil wars, industrial revolution and tea parties etc and I've forgotten most of it. Since I'm Irish though, understandably my education focused more on Irish history, leprechauns and shamrocks, that kind of thing. And no I've never taken comparative theology in college, I took computer engineering instead as I felt I had a better aptitude for it. A fact no less irrelevant to the original argument than nearly everything you wrote. You're entitled to your faith, just don't use words like "limited ability" "Only children" etc when you ramble on about it, you'll piss people off.

  13. Larry's back at it, but there is no black hole by Laxator2 · · Score: 1

    I looked at the abstract of the actual paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0609024 and it looks like they discuss a case where the black hole does not really form, the domain wall that collapses in their model evaporates and a singularity does not form. This does not quite address the case of dropping an object into an already-formed black hole, but it sounds good for a press release, especially since the neighbors at Fermilab have made a habit of it.

  14. They're doing it wrong by realmolo · · Score: 4, Funny

    A Slashdotter would realize that if you don't want to see any information, you need to view the event horizon with a threshold of -1.
     

    1. Re:They're doing it wrong by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You can pretty much read the comments at +5 for any article filed under Politics and still see no information.

  15. Duh? by Toonol · · Score: 1

    ...what is controversial about the new finding is that 'from an external viewer's point it takes an infinite amount of time to form an event horizon and that the clock for the objects falling into the black hole appears to slow down to zero,'

    Not to be a smartass, but isn't that a no-brainer? I always figured that was the case. Objects never cross an event horizon (from perspective of the rest of the universe) in the same way nothing ever accelerates to the speed of light. Time/space distortion stops it from happening.

    1. Re:Duh? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So what's the position as a function of time for an object falling toward an event horizon 1 light-year away, from an external viewer's point? We agree that initally the object will pick up speed. What are you saying:

      - the object will start to slow down (hard to believe since it's getting closer and closer to something massive), or
      - the event horizon wasn't 1 light-year away to start with but is always infinitely far away?

    2. Re:Duh? by ShadeOfBlue · · Score: 1

      I too came to that conclusion in high school. Since time slows to a stop at a singularity (as viewed from an external observer), it seems nothing should ever completely fall into a blackhole, and similarly, the components of a collapsing star should never quite shrink to zero size. Of course, this isn't a rigorous argument, I suppose to be precise you'd really need to look at the rates of change. It's possible this thinking is making a mistake similar to what one finds in Zeno's paradoxes.

      If, however, this reasoning is correct, it seems like the most elegant solution to the problem of singularities and event horizons. In no finite amount of time can you generate a singularity, and similarly no information can pass behind an event horizon in a finite amount of time, so why worry about it?

      Poopoo on professional physicists if this is true and they'd just never thought of it before.

    3. Re:Duh? by Carnildo · · Score: 2, Insightful

      It's well-established that, if you only consider relativistic effects, a black hole will never form. What this paper does is demonstrate that if you take quantum effects into account, it's still true.

      --
      "They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
    4. Re:Duh? by geekoid · · Score: 1

      Well, you can say Apples fall to the ground, to to prove why and how are different matter.
      So while saying "If I drop this apple it will fall" is a D'uh, WHy and how are for more complex.

      --
      The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
  16. Zeno of Elea... by idontgno · · Score: 2, Interesting
    --
    Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
  17. Finally, The Weapons of Mass Destruction by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0


    can be found here.

    Cheers,
    Donald Metro

  18. Eliminating Black Holes Eliminates Paradox by DJ_Adequate · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I'm sure it's not that simple, but that sure seems like what the article is saying. Black Holes would take infinitely long to form, so we'll never see one form, so no information will be lost. It sure doesn't seem to add up to me, since I thought there was pretty good evidence for black holes--and the universe hasn't existed for an infinitely long time. Still, when has quantum stuff ever made sense?

    1. Re:Eliminating Black Holes Eliminates Paradox by iMySti · · Score: 1

      It says it takes an infinite time for the EH to form, so perhaps we see BHs in a state that is not their fully evolved form, but still what we have observed and defined them as. Its like when you find a Pokemon, and its pretty Kickass (say a Machop) but later you find out it actually evolves into a Machoke which is even stronger and more kickass. Still, the Machop's name is Kickass.

    2. Re:Eliminating Black Holes Eliminates Paradox by Plutonite · · Score: 1

      Still, when has quantum stuff ever made sense? Alone, it makes sense in many cases. With gravity, never. With alcohol, always.
    3. Re:Eliminating Black Holes Eliminates Paradox by secPM_MS · · Score: 1
      Since when can you observe the event horizon? Is the question even meaningful? You get Hawking radiation from the region in space immediately outside of the event horizon.

      I love theory. But I value experimental observation even more. We don't have any nearby black holes that we know of, but there is the rather massive black hole in the center of the galaxy and a stellar mass black hole in Scorpius X1. VLBI observation and gamma-ray observation allow us to observe rather close to the event horizon, but at astronomical distances we are highly unlikely to conduct observations within epsilon of an event horizon.

    4. Re:Eliminating Black Holes Eliminates Paradox by DJ_Adequate · · Score: 1
      I've been reading some more and found this. Sure enough, they have eliminated black holes.

      They find that the gravity of the collapsing mass starts to disrupt the quantum vacuum, generating what they call "pre-Hawking" radiation. Losing that radiation reduces the total mass-energy of the object - so that it never gets dense enough to form an event horizon and a true black hole. "There are no such things", Vachaspati told New Scientist. "There are only stars going toward being a black hole but not getting there."
      According to the author of this paper, that thing in the center of the galaxy is not a black hole--just a black star, always collapsing but never collapsed. From this article http://space.newscientist.com/article/dn12089-do-b lack-holes-really-exist.html it seems like other scientists are skeptical about this as well.
    5. Re:Eliminating Black Holes Eliminates Paradox by Khashishi · · Score: 1

      What we see in the centers of galaxies might not be black holes, but "almost" black holes--massive conglomerations of mass frozen in time, in the process of forming black holes which will never (in finite time) be complete.

    6. Re:Eliminating Black Holes Eliminates Paradox by secPM_MS · · Score: 1

      If it acts like a black hole outside of a radius = black hole radius *(1 + epsilon) where epsilon is relatively small, does anyone care? We should be able to observe general relativistic strong field effects relatively soon. This might allow falsification if the range of the effect is large enough. If this theory doesn't affect those results, it is likely more of a semantic issue than a physical issue with observable effects.

    7. Re:Eliminating Black Holes Eliminates Paradox by lawpoop · · Score: 1

      Well, if this theory is true, that a black hole never completely collapses until the end of time, it means that we can see the event horizon of a black hole, but the hole part never forms until the end of the universe. The further we look into a black hole, the further into the future we look, because a black hole is a warping of time. And the center of it, the black hole part, exists infinitely into the future, or the end of time.

      Like I said in this other post, a black hole is not a thing that warps time and space, it *is* a warping of time-space. And because it warps matter-time-space to an infinite density, it takes an infinitely long time to do so. Sort of like how it takes an infinite amount of energy and time to reach C, the speed of light. It's because when you do reach the speed of light, you have reached the fastest speed, so nothing appears to be moving, because nothing can move faster than the speed of light, which you are now moving at.

      IANAP, so feel free to chime in and correct me.

      --
      Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
      -- Pablo Picasso
    8. Re:Eliminating Black Holes Eliminates Paradox by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Your language is somewhat crude grasshopper. Black holes can exist. What can't exist, according to this new theory, is a singularity with an event horizon. What you call a black hole completely collapsing, ie. a singularity, will never happen because the black hole will evaporate in finite time (an immensely long but finite time). From present knowledge there is no 'end to the universe' only a heat death, but time will still go on.

    9. Re:Eliminating Black Holes Eliminates Paradox by lawpoop · · Score: 1

      Your language is somewhat crude grasshopper. I agree .

      Black holes can exist. What can't exist, according to this new theory, is a singularity with an event horizon. In common parlance, I think people are talking about the singularity when they say 'black hole'. They don't mean the matter swirling around it.

      I mean, what is a black hole without a singularity? Wouldn't it missing the 'black hole' part?

      From present knowledge there is no 'end to the universe' only a heat death, but time will still go on. A side point, but doesn't time stop if you read the speed of light?
      --
      Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
      -- Pablo Picasso
    10. Re:Eliminating Black Holes Eliminates Paradox by mshurpik · · Score: 1

      >IANAP, so feel free to chime in and correct me.

      It sounds to me like you understand the difference between time and speed better than most. The universe understands speed, there is a limit. Time is a reduction of that.

      Anything moving at perfect speed has, by definition, infinite time to complete its task. Observers at lower speeds get to watch and die in the meantime.

    11. Re:Eliminating Black Holes Eliminates Paradox by guruevi · · Score: 1

      Who says the universe didn't exist for an infinitely long time? The universe we are in or that is current or even the one that we experience might not have been around for an infinitely long time but then again, it might have been.

      Was our universe existing in what some call the "beginning" of the universe, maybe in a different form? For example: did you "exist" partly in your dad's seed and your mothers egg, in the twinkle of their eyes, in their DNA or that of your grandparents? Most likely you (or at least a infinitely small part of you) did exist hundreds of years ago, yet it was not YOU as a person, rather a more simple form like a part of DNA.

      I personally believe that the universe (or an infinitely large void) did exist long before our universe as we know it came into existence and that things were roaming around in that universe.

      --
      Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
  19. Quote from article by johnny+cashed · · Score: 1

    "It's complicated and very complex," noted the researchers

    What an understatement.

    1. Re:Quote from article by aminorex · · Score: 1

      Yeah, that was a hoot. I suspect they said it in the form of an elatic chorus, wearing togas, in pentatonic harmony, with heavy Serbian accents.

      We really should replace the word "complex" with "octonionic" in most circumstances, for the sake of accuracy.

      --
      -I like my women like I like my tea: green-
  20. Complicated and complex by DJ_Adequate · · Score: 1

    Well, that makes it difficult. If it was just one or the other, maybe I could understand it. But if it's complicated and complex...
    We English majors may not know math, but we can spot redundancy at least.

    1. Re:Complicated and complex by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      There have been times when I, as a mathematician, have used both complex and complicated to describe something non-redundantly. Depending on context, the word complex might have a very specific mathematical meaning (e.g., complex systems or even complex numbers). In these cases, the complex math might be easy or not-so-easy to understand. For these attributes, one often resorts to using the terms "simple" or "complicated" (since complex is already taken), respectively.


      I am not claiming that this is what happened in this case. In fact I have met Tanmay, and (as his first language is not English) this seems a likely mistake for him to make.

  21. what does the scouter say about his power level by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    its over nine thousand

  22. Rename 'Black holes' to 'Wholes' by Timesprout · · Score: 2, Funny

    Then everything is complete and the Universe is in harmony. Problem solved.

    --
    Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
    What truth?
    There is no dupe
  23. Prrof this can't be valid by JustNiz · · Score: 1

    'from an external viewer's point it takes an infinite amount of time to form an event horizon and that the clock for the objects falling into the black hole appears to slow down to zero,' ...so surely if it takes an infinite amount of time to form an event horizon then we shouldn't have seen any yet. But we have.

    1. Re:Prrof this can't be valid by grikdog · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Achilles vs. the Tortoise all over again?

      --
      ``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
    2. Re:Prrof this can't be valid by lapagecp · · Score: 1

      You are missing the whole point. If you throw a ball into the air it falls to the ground right. Thats gravity. So if you have a massive amound of well mass then you will get a massive amount of gravity. A black hole is not a quatative thing. Its not either there or not. It forms from compact matter with some serious gravity. So imagine something is so heavy that if you add one more atom, it will form a black hole. Now stand very far away and watch as the atom falls in toward the object. It will get closer and closer slower and slower but never reach it. Thats becuase gravity warps space time. Just because something isn't yet a black hole doesn't mean it doesn't look a hell of a lot like one. And besides remember that time is just a preception of simple beings like us. If you could step back from our limited perspective and see all of time you would see the black hole at the end but being mere humans all we get to see is something thats getting closer to being one.

  24. new scientist article by mrpeebles · · Score: 3, Informative

    There is an article about this same thing in new scientist
    http://space.newscientist.com/article/dn12089-do-b lack-holes-really-exist.html
    It quotes 't Hooft as claiming that "The process he describes can in no way produce enough radiation to make a black hole disappear as quickly as he is suggesting." So I am skeptical.

  25. Divide by zero error by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Black holes are the 3d spatial equivalent of zero.

    f(x) = 1/x
    f(1) = 1
    f(100) = 0.01 ...
    f(oo) = 0?

    All this solution is saying is that like 1/x as x->infinity approaches but never equals zero, information approaches but never enters a black hole. So if you throw something into a black hole what really happens is that it basically gets stuck approaching the event horizon but never reaches it.

    This means there could be lopsided black holes... where more mass had gotten 'stuck' on one part of the even horizon than other parts. If you are what is 'thrown' into the black hole then you get to find out what happens at the end of the universe.

    1. Re:Divide by zero error by Nyago · · Score: 4, Funny

      you get to find out what happens at the end of the universe.
      Over a nice meal. :D
      --
      Reality is fluffy!
  26. nice but by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    "..clock for the objects falling into the black hole appears to slow down to zero.."
    Is that BEFORE their bodies are torn into "singularity" or after?

  27. I see ... by spotlight2k3 · · Score: 2, Funny

    So we finally have a possible answer to why we see so many dupes.
    1. They aren't dupes and they don't exist because they never form ....
    2. they are dupes but come from another universe where they have been deleted and saved here....

  28. No... by msauve · · Score: 4, Informative

    we haven't (seen any black holes). You can't "see" a black hole (that's why they're named as they are). We have observed the effects of things which match our expectation of the effects a black hole would cause. I assume the authors of this paper explain how their black-hole-like-object-which-isn't-a-black-hole can cause the same effects.

    --
    "National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
    1. Re:No... by JustNiz · · Score: 1

      you're missing my point.
      By 'see' I don't mean visibly. I mean that anything that takes an infinite amount of time to form will therefore never completely form, so therefore shouldn't ever exist in its entirety, yet black holes have been proven to have complete event horizons.

    2. Re:No... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The difference between an object that almost has formed an event horizon, and one that has formed an event horizon is very small. Its one of those cases where the last 0.0000000000001% of the process takes 99.9999999999999999% of the time (only more so).

  29. Hawking Radiation by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Does anyone know how this paper deals with Hawking radiation.

  30. I just tested the theory by mrwolf007 · · Score: 1

    Didnt have any fancy equipment, just a neon glow stick.
    Threw it into a couple of normal holes first.
    Knew when it had arrived due to the fact i could see it.
    The problem with the black hole was that it seemed moving slower and slower as it got closer to the event horizon, not even getting there.
    Obviosly you cant throw anything into black holes. Or would you prefer to believe people telling you that light moves slower away from the black the closer you get to the event horizon?

    But ive got an information loss problem of my own.
    I got this neat random number generator with a lcd display that generates a random number every second.
    Ever since i placed in inside a black box i dont know what number it displays.
    Anyone know how to find out what number it displays without opening the box?

    1. Re:I just tested the theory by norton_I · · Score: 1

      But ive got an information loss problem of my own.
      I got this neat random number generator with a lcd display that generates a random number every second.
      Ever since i placed in inside a black box i dont know what number it displays.
      Anyone know how to find out what number it displays without opening the box?


      Any time we try to look at such things at the microscopic level. the history of which random numbers were displayed is recorded somewhere (often many places), for instance in the motional states of the atoms that make up the box and lcd (aka heat). It is the same "paradox" as exists in classical mechanics vs. statistical mechanics -- individual interactions are always reversable via CPT symmetry. Only when you blur things enough you can't see the individual interactions do you get properties like temperature.

      The difference is that a particle falling into a black hole and being emitted as hawking radiation appears to be fundamentally non-unitary (quantum mechanical speak for non-reversable / information losing). Many people find it odd, and unlikely that every process in the universe is unitary except around black holes. Hence attempts to find alternative theories.

      No conclusive answer will be found until we come up with a unified theory of quantum gravity and experimentally verify it. However, examining the weird boundaries between the quantum world and GR will help us understand what we are looking for in a unified theory.
    2. Re:I just tested the theory by mrwolf007 · · Score: 1

      The difference is that a particle falling into a black hole and being emitted as hawking radiation appears to be fundamentally non-unitary (quantum mechanical speak for non-reversable / information losing). Many people find it odd, and unlikely that every process in the universe is unitary except around black holes. Hence attempts to find alternative theories. Last time i read about Hawking radiation this effect was attributed to "Paarbildung" (dont know the english term, the quantum machanical effect that causes a particle and an anti-particle to spontanously appear, and usually destroy themselves shortly after). When this happens at the event horizon its possible for one particle to get caught in the black hole while the other escapes.
      Thus i still cant see how the Hawking radiation directly relates to anything INSIDE the black hole (except maybe for the fact that a corresponding anti-particle will have to be inside the black hole).
    3. Re:I just tested the theory by NemoinSpace · · Score: 1

      42 of course.

  31. Is that all? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I figured this out as a child, and even how have been shaking my head at all of these blackhole revelations. It there is infinite gravity at the center of a tootsie roll then there will be infinite time dialation... therefore, nothing has ever been "swallowed" by a blackhole and nothing ever will.

    I'll take my Nobel Prize on the way out, thanks!

  32. black holes have no hair... by slew · · Score: 3, Informative

    This means there could be lopsided black holes...

    No. Black holes aren't lopsided
  33. There's a bug then right there by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    If it would take an infinite amount of time for the object to reach black hole, then it would also take an infinite amount of time for it to exhibit the quantum effects.

    My 50 cents is on BS.

    Anyway, time has slowed down for a photon, and nobody is saying those never reach their goals, either.

  34. This is why you need to keep back ups by EmbeddedJanitor · · Score: 0

    In case you drop your laptop in a black hole.

    --
    Engineering is the art of compromise.
  35. This article is identical to what we covered... by tlambert · · Score: 2, Informative

    This article is identical to what we covered... in 300 level Modern Physics in college in 1983.

    I don't see how this is new or radical, except for the general population, who seem to think that for every "black hole" there is a corresponding "white hole", or that when you "fall into a black hole", you somehow end up somewhere else.

    You should read Feynman's lecture series; he has one from the 50's that debunks the idea of a "graviton" or a particulate carrier for gravity because of the need for it to have mass.

    -- Terry

    1. Re:This article is identical to what we covered... by Wolfger · · Score: 1

      This article is identical to what we covered... in 300 level Modern Physics
      Oh, yeah! When the King of Sparta kicked that Persian messenger into the black hole? And he fell in slow motion? That rocked! Who says movies aren't educational anymore?
    2. Re:This article is identical to what we covered... by aminorex · · Score: 1

      > debunks the idea of a "graviton" or a particulate carrier for gravity because of the need for it to have mass.

      Some problems with that description:

      1) So particles which act to mediate forces require mass huh? Like, say, photons?

      2) If you don't allow recursive feynmann diagrams, you're pretty much tossing all of renormalization theory.

      I have no familiarity with the lecture you describe, so I don't know if your characterization is dim, or if the original lecture is just plain wrong -- after all, you're talking about 50 year-old physics, so it's probably totally obsolete and wrong. Being the words of a Laureate does not sanctify ignorance.

      --
      -I like my women like I like my tea: green-
  36. The Master will be pleased to find out... by jameskojiro · · Score: 0

    That he did survive because his information was stored in the Galifreyian Mainframe known as the "Eye of Harmony" which we all know is a Black Hole that the Timelords control. Good thing we found out about this before this weekend because the Master is back and all the nerds who worry about such details will be happy to know that the Master's Information survived and you we won't see posts about "The Master Couldn't have survived a Black Hole cause i live in my mom's basement" being plastered all over these internets tubes.

    --
    Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
  37. Does the inside of an event horizon exist? by hamster_nz · · Score: 1

    If I understand this right, it is saying that from an external frame an object will not cross the event horizon.

    But from a local frame of reference you will, except due to the distortion in spacetime time will be running infinitely slow - the upshot being that you will cross the event horizon at the end of (external) time or when the black hole (and event horizon) evaporates.

    Is the far side of an event horizon a spacetime disconnected from the external space time? Does it really exist at all? I wonder if the gravitational signature of a black hole is that of a solid sphere or a hollow shell?

    1. Re:Does the inside of an event horizon exist? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What I don't get is that they are saying that time from an external pov approaches infinite slowness as matter approaches the black hole. But is gravity not force over time? So if the matter is in infinitely slow time should not it's gravity also be infinitely weaker? Is gravity then calculated in the time of the local body? are gravity and time not related?

    2. Re:Does the inside of an event horizon exist? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You confusion is with the notion of time. The time an infalling observer would measure on his wrist watch (proper time) to cross the event horizon and hit the singularity is finite. The time an asympotic Schwarzschild observer would measure for the in-falling observer is infinite. These seemingly paradoxical measurements can be related by a simple coordinate transformation.

  38. The string theorists are going to have a cow by postbigbang · · Score: 0

    The cow might be in the barn, but it might not.

    If all black holes were present at or nearly at the big bang, then the universe is pocked with bunches of black holes, which by their proposed definitions, are time-less. When one considers the simplicity of time warps around these uber masses, then time is non-linear, universally, subject to the proximity to a black hole. The fabric of space is therefore more like the surface of a mattress with a buttoner who's gone mad, randomly creating divots.

    This also means that the Schwarzchild radius is probably not uniform, and also non-linear. In fact, therein might lay the proof. Watch the light shift around a radius, and you can probably see how time/mass is or is not linear.... thus proving/disproving/causing madness/ for this hypthesis.

    --
    ---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
  39. No... by msauve · · Score: 2, Insightful

    they haven't (proven that event horizons exist). I'll paraphrase my earlier response, maybe repetition will help you learn. We have observed objects which exhibit behavior consistent with what we would expect from observing an event horizon. I expect that the paper which is the subject of this discussion explains how their black-hole-like-object-without-an-event-horizon can also exhibit the observed behavior.

    --
    "National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
  40. /dev/null by Locklin · · Score: 0, Redundant

    Damn, I read the title and thought someone had figured out where /dev/null goes.

    --
    "Knowledge is the only instrument of production that is not subject to diminishing returns" -Journal of Political Econom
  41. Microscopic black holes by TropicalCoder · · Score: 1

    I found this idea about microscopic black holes much more interesting. They are talking about the idea that these things could be rattling around inside the sun, or inside Jupiter and causing it to heat up, or even inside the earth. It was also suggested that the new Large Hadron Collider might be capable of creating microscopic black holes through the collision of particles at relativistic velocities.
    I once read a scifi story decades ago about this tiny black hole that revolved around a planet close to the surface, leaving a hole behind whenever it passed through a mountain or whatever. I never forgot that story and was fascinated by the concept.

  42. just a quick take at the dichotomy paradox by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    a line is simply a series of points, although there are an infinity number of points on any given line. but every defined line also has a defined length, if you travel at a constant rate, starting at the beginning of the line, and stopping at the end, you will (during that time it takes to traverse the line) have approached, arrived at, and passed every single one of the infinite points on that line, excluding the initial point, which you did not approach, and the final point, which you did not pass. you therefore did complete an infinite number of tasks, in fact using this explanation, you did so THREE TIMES, excluding the very first task and the very last task.

  43. Well DUH! by TomRC · · Score: 1


    That's so obvious I've been wondering for years why anyone thought there was a paradox.

    1. Re:Well DUH! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Shut up, Stephen.

  44. Yet another assumed interpretation of QM by Liquidrage · · Score: 0

    I can't take anyone seriously that would say:
    "In fact, since in quantum mechanics the observer plays an important role in measurement"

    That is not a fact.
    Most of the pain and *weirdness* from interpretations of QM comes from an assumed free will of the human observer. John Bell talks about this and has used the term "superdeterminism" to explain a universe where even us, the human observer, lacks true free will.

    No, I'm not being weird myself or "out there". I just have no reason to believe our choices follow different rules then an apple falling from a tree. It is a assumption that *obviously* some sort of metaphysical free-will exists in humans that has led to much of the *weirdness* of QM. The kitten is only dead or alive because of *human free will* being assumed.
    It's time to stop creating more problems by pretending we're special. There's no proof of it so science shouldn't be considering it.

    1. Re:Yet another assumed interpretation of QM by mshurpik · · Score: 4, Interesting

      That's an interesting viewpoint, but I don't think you understand physics.

      QM lies at the physical border of observable physics. At the QM boundary, concepts we take for granted such as electrons and the speed of light have different meaning. Humanity has nothing to do with it. At a small scale, the behavior of matter changes.

      Here's an analogy:

      Let's say Newtonian (ordinary) physics involves sitting on the side of the road and tracking how fast people are driving in their cars. From this perspective, you can get a pretty good idea where the cars are going. But there's still some randomness to it, if some driver changes their mind.

      In this analogy, QM would be like sitting inside each car tracking who is having what conversation, who is on their cellphone, whether their hands are on the gearshift or on their girlfriend's boob, etc. It's a whole other level that you can't see from the side of the road.

      If you could be inside each car, then you would know. But you can't. That's QM, the individual decision-making of each driver on the road.

      Each driver==each electron. Whether you choose to track electrons with free will or with robotics, it's still too small and random to keep track of all the time.

    2. Re:Yet another assumed interpretation of QM by largesnike · · Score: 1

      Okay, I'm going to have a crack at this because I think even this is only haif the story:

      The effect of measurement within the car, like, say observing that the driver's hand is in fact on the gearstick, rather than his girlfriends boob. Has collapsed the wave function to the hand on gearstick state. This negates the other possible states, and it does so retro-actively. This is because it takes a finite time to make the observation, during which the observed has to make preparations for the correct state upon collapse. The Best example of this is observing a photon that has (necessarily) gone one way around an intervening galaxy to appear as a spot on your phosphour screen as opposed to the interference pattern observed by a photon interfering with itself as it goes both ways round at once. In this case, the preparation time is millions of years. Demonstrating the paradox rather nicely.

      Therefore the observed has to back track in its history, so that it can behave as observed.

      The grandparent suggests one way around this absurdity, which is if we had no free-will, then the photon/driver's hand is already fated to be observed in a particular way. But Bell himself, I believe, thought that this was rediculous.

      So the problem remains (to most people's opinion). Many of suggested all sorts of solutions that make mockeries of Occam's Razor such as many worlds theorems, but for me, I think the Copenhagen Interpretation is the original and best.

      --
      "Laugh while you can a-monkey boy!" - Dr Emilio Lizardo
    3. Re:Yet another assumed interpretation of QM by idlemachine · · Score: 1

      QM lies at the physical border of observable physics. At the QM boundary, concepts we take for granted such as electrons and the speed of light have different meaning. Humanity has nothing to do with it. At a small scale, the behavior of matter changes.

      Would it be more correct to say that the behaviour of matter is the same but that our model of that behaviour is insufficient to continue to predict it at that smaller scale?

    4. Re:Yet another assumed interpretation of QM by mshurpik · · Score: 1

      Would it be more correct to say that the behaviour of matter is the same but that our model of that behaviour is insufficient to continue to predict it at that smaller scale?

      Yes, thank you.

      However,

      If you can cross the distance of an atom, via strong/weak forces, as quickly as you can cross that distance via the speed of light, then you have a new physics.

      Entirely predictable, of course. It's just a whole other realm where forces converge. The short distances make speed a different issue.

    5. Re:Yet another assumed interpretation of QM by mshurpik · · Score: 1

      20721 FTW?

      It's so five years ago. Well, to be accurate, more like seven.

    6. Re:Yet another assumed interpretation of QM by azenpunk · · Score: 1

      wouldn't we need free will to stop pretending we're special?

    7. Re:Yet another assumed interpretation of QM by largesnike · · Score: 1
      well that's when I did QM at Uni. So enlighten me great one!

      20721 FTW? Got me there chief, what are you on about?
      --
      "Laugh while you can a-monkey boy!" - Dr Emilio Lizardo
    8. Re:Yet another assumed interpretation of QM by mcrbids · · Score: 1


      Each driver==each electron. Whether you choose to track electrons with free will or with robotics, it's still too small and random to keep track of all the time.


      Cool! A car analogy! I think that when you track electrons with free will or with robotics, they're more like cars with sirens on them. You know, cops. Like you see on TV late nights, where they have hot chicks run DNA tests.

      Mmmmmm... Hot chicks with big breasts....

      Sorry, was I saying something?

      --
      I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
    9. Re:Yet another assumed interpretation of QM by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "I just have no reason to believe our choices follow different rules then an apple falling from a tree. It is a assumption that *obviously* some sort of metaphysical free-will exists in humans that has led to much of the *weirdness* of QM."

      You just had to say that, didn't you?

      Actually, such determinism would free everyone from any responsibility whatsoever, wouldn't it? Instead of the old "devil made me do it" we can now just say "my constituent particles made me do it." People these days are always looking for a way to duck personal responsibility, it seems, so I'd expect the belief in hard determinism to become quite popular.

      Whoops, I used the word belief. Sorry about that: my constituent particles slipped up, and I was always destined to type that.

      Don't discount the free will part of consciousness just because you can't wire a meter to it.

    10. Re:Yet another assumed interpretation of QM by nine-times · · Score: 1

      In this analogy, QM would be like sitting inside each car tracking who is having what conversation, who is on their cellphone, whether their hands are on the gearshift or on their girlfriend's boob, etc. It's a whole other level that you can't see from the side of the road.

      Almost. It'd be a little more like trying to measure whether the driver's hand is on the gearshift or his girlfriend's boob or the steering wheel-- except that you're blind and the only way to know is to grab the guy and see where his hands are, and every time you touch him he gets freaked out and moves his hand. You can tell where is hand was, but measuring the location of his hands move them so you can't really know where they are or where they'll be at any given moment.

      It really isn't an issue of "free will". Whether we have "free will" or not, the act of our measuring changes things. Perhaps a better way of showing the problem is to point out that the way we measure things is always to hit it with something. Imagine measuring the location of a puck on an air-hockey table, but doing this in the dark with an air-hockey paddle. When you hit it, you know where it is, but now you've knocked it someplace else.

      Now, instead you can use a flashlight and look on the air-hockey table, and but you aren't really doing something different. You're still hitting it with something, but this time light. The light bounces off, and since the light has no mass, the energy transfered to the puck isn't enough to move it. However, if the puck were very small and had very little mass, even the light could move the puck. If the puck were small enough, anything you could bounce off the puck (including light) to see where it is would move the puck enough that any attempt to measure the puck would necessarily move the puck. This would put a lot of restrictions on how you could measure the puck, and once you've measured it, what you could say about it.

      That's kind of (sort of) the problem with quantum mechanics. If you get small enough, there's no way to measure things without changing them, and it isn't even clear what you're measuring anymore. It may even be that putting the energy in to measure something creates the thing you've measured. The particle might not even be in the location you're measuring if not for the fact that you've measured.

    11. Re:Yet another assumed interpretation of QM by Liquidrage · · Score: 1

      I'm sorry, what does "truth" have to do with "I don't like it".

      Which is what you're proposing.
      I wouldn't want to take away personal responsibility due to the absence of free will. However, without any evidence of true free will, I can't say I find it valid.

    12. Re:Yet another assumed interpretation of QM by Liquidrage · · Score: 1

      Actually, I understand this quite well. And I find it absurd that you missed my point entirely went off on a meaningless tangent, and got +5 for it.

      And you could have easily done the search for Bell's word, not mine, who I doubt you would say doesn't understand physics.

      The assumption of true free will, the belief that the human observer is of course free from determinism, is used as evidence for a non-deterministic view of the rest of the universe. That was exactly's Bell point in this. And this is exactly the relevancy of the observer.
      In other words, humans assumed themselves differently then the rest of the universe, and thus showed that the results show the universe itself is non-deterministic.

      The quote I used from the story was on the role of the observer. And that interpretation *is* 100% a result of assumed free-will of the human observer.

    13. Re:Yet another assumed interpretation of QM by mshurpik · · Score: 1

      In other words, humans assumed themselves differently then the rest of the universe, and thus showed that the results show the universe itself is non-deterministic.

      OK, so the universe is deterministic.

      Want to count quarks? All 10^80 of them? Plus whatever sub-quantum physics havent been discovered yet?

      I'm perfectly willing to believe that the univese is deterministic. It doesn't mean we're smart enough to keep track of it all.

    14. Re:Yet another assumed interpretation of QM by Liquidrage · · Score: 1

      I don't think we are either. Maybe never will be. Who knows?

      But it amazes me that so many people are willing to jump through hoops to try and explain the world through QM assuming our true free-will, when an easier explanation is right in front of them. But the latter requires one to give up something that is so dearly wanted yet never proven.
      In fact, everything from chemicals altering choices to reaction tests are evidence against hard free-will. But it won't go away because of the desire for it.

    15. Re:Yet another assumed interpretation of QM by mshurpik · · Score: 1

      You're still missing my original point, QM and "free will" have nothing to do with each other.

      Let's imagine that humans cease to exist. Does QM go away? No, it does not. QM is a scientific theory, it describes everything, human or not.

      Do apples fall upwards in a world where Newton never lived? Is gravity based on Newton's life, or does gravity just exist, waiting to be observed?

      If you want to get into "a tree falling in the forest", well...now you're the one who is being anthropomorphic.

  45. Old News - nothing to see by enmane · · Score: 1

    Apparently one of the physicists has just purchased a DVD of Andromeda and watched the first few episodes. It burns me up that sci-fi writers are so darned smart!

  46. More Details by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
    Seems there are quite a few very subtle misunderstandings that are extrapolated into not-quite-correct ideas (I agree with parent post btw, just thought I would add my .02 c to this). It's my understanding that what they are saying is that black holes -->as we CURRENTLY understand them

    The idea of a black hole right now revolves around the formation of a singularity - a geometric point in space with zero volume/area and infinite density. What these guys are saying is that the black hole formation process never quite reaches this singularity phase (i.e. they say it takes infinitely long to reach that phase).



    Since the singularity is never completed, the event horizon -->as we NOW define it
    These guys are saying that black holes still exist but we just have to mess with the exact definition of them a bit.



    Whether their analysis is correct or not is better left to peer review, but there's the explanation.



  47. So a black hole is the ultimate storage media? by MadRat · · Score: 1

    Wouldn't that make a blackhole kind of like an iPod for God? Instead of storage for song data, it records the entire history of the universe. Of course we couldn't even read it since its stored in such a way you could never unravel it...

  48. Universe runs an OS? by LingNoi · · Score: 1

    So is the stuff in black holes is just moved to the /tmp folder or /dev/null?

    1. Re:Universe runs an OS? by fellip_nectar · · Score: 1

      I prefer to think of it more as a Reiser4 filesystem.

      --
      Worst. Signature. Ever.
  49. Undetectable? by loqi · · Score: 1

    It depends on how you define detection. If the quantum suicide experiment actually worked, the parallel nature of the universe could be locally discerned (for an arbitrarily sized group of "local" observers, in principle), but it would actually be detecting the loss of parallel branches, rather than their continued presence.

    --
    If other reasons we do lack, we swear no one will die when we attack
    1. Re:Undetectable? by SuSEboy · · Score: 1

      OK, so go kill yourself and tell us the results.

    2. Re:Undetectable? by TexVex · · Score: 1

      And that's the best they can come up with as a way to prove Many-Worlds? Russian Roulette with a quantum trigger?

      I was only half joking when comparing MWIs to religion; now I am starting to believe it is a cult, right down to the suicide pact.

      Or maybe the whole thing is just an elaborate joke.

      --
      Fun with Anagarams! LADS HOST, SHALT DOS. HAS DOLTS. AD SLOTHS, HATS SOLD. ASS HO, LTD.
  50. Space-Time cannot rip apart by lazy+genes · · Score: 0

    My retarted guess is that.The information will turn into gravity waves well before time has a chance to stop.Space-time cannot rip apart .Matter will always change into something well before it comes to a complete stop.You will never see a massive black hole emiting jets in a spiral.Only ball shaped galaxies emit jets .The jets are at right angles to the center of the cluster.

  51. the observer's frame of reference?? by nairbv · · Score: 1

    'from an external viewer's point it takes an infinite amount of time to form an event horizon and that the clock for the objects falling into the black hole appears to slow down to zero,' huh? time doesn't slow down to an external viewer. this doesn't make any sense to me. fine, if *I* get thrown into a black hole, maybe I'll accelerate to close to the speed of light, and so time will slow down in my frame of reference, and so it will seem that I will never reach the ... event horizon, or whatever. But, if I'm outside, far from the effects of the black hole's gravitational field, why would I be affected? Can anyone explain this?

    1. Re:the observer's frame of reference?? by yndrd1984 · · Score: 1
      To make it clearer:

      'from an external viewer's point it takes an infinite amount of time to form an event horizon and, from that external perspective, the clock for the objects falling into the black hole appears to slow down to zero,'

      so time will slow down in my frame of reference, and so it will seem that I will never reach the ... event horizon

      Not quite, time slows down for you in my frame of reference, far from the hole. You always see yourself going through time at the same rate.

      But, if I'm outside, far from the effects of the black hole's gravitational field, why would I be affected?

      You wouldn't be affected, but the effect the hole has on me (while I'm falling in) will change the way you see me.

  52. Same as stars by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    This works the same as stars. Stars don't result in gravity, rather their location is a gravitational warping of space-time that creates a gravity well. These gravity wells attract all kinds of space junk eventually forming a star. The bigger the well, the bigger the resulting star. :)

  53. Sorry, Gene Roddenberry by trveler · · Score: 1

    This means that the Andromeda would never have come back out of the black hole.

    --
    ... is whot bwings os tugevza tsuzay.
    1. Re:Sorry, Gene Roddenberry by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      The Andromeda Ascendant didn't 'enter' the black hole. It just got close enough to the event horizon for the time dilation to be significant.

  54. Rotating black hole by calixaren · · Score: 1

    Has anybody an idea, if this conclusion is valid even for rotating black holes?

    1. Re:Rotating black hole by lowen · · Score: 2, Informative

      As they use the common technique of truncating the field degrees of freedom to a finite subset in the treatment of the Wheeler-de Witt equation,specifically, by only treating the radial R, they limit themselves to spherical domain walls instead of lenticular domain walls. A rotating mass in collapse tends lenticular (although that is a vast oversimplification), so the short answer is that they do not really treat the case of rotating masses.

      Likewise, they are dealing only with domain walls of zero thickness.

      However, this does adequately describe any given spherical domain wall of uniform density; nonspherical domain walls can be treated as a set of spherical domain walls with nonuniform density. However, I'm not sure if the tensor describing a nonuniformly dense domain wall is even solvable with current techniques or not; a lenticular tensor may be easier, but as this is at the very grey edge of my math skills, I haven't the foggiest idea if that is true for the general treatment of the Wheeler-de Witt equation.

      Reading the preprint is rather informative; while the math is a little beyond my grasp, the concepts are not, and their 'conclusions' are very enlightening, as they detail problems in their analysis that suggest possible issues.

      First, they deal with the lack of rigorous treatment of unspecific backreaction, and state that until such treament is available the final fate of the collapsing object is indeterminate.

      Second, they deal with their assumptions and the possible changes in their results due to their assumptions (the zero thickness domain wall, the domain wall being spherical and of uniform density, their truncation of superspace to minisuperspace, the lack of allowance for possible third quantization due to annihilation and creation of domain walls, their Langrangian not breaking down near the Shwarzschild horizon, etc, all of which are in the preprint).

      It is quite a fascinating read.

  55. Old knowledge by Bromskloss · · Score: 1

    the clock for the objects falling into the black hole appears to slow down to zero

    I don't know as much about relativity as I would like to, but hasn't this been known since forever?

    --
    Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
    1. Re:Old knowledge by aminorex · · Score: 1

      > hasn't this been known since forever?

      Since, on the assumptions of the article, information is always preserved, anything which has ever been known has been known since forever, I can confidently (on the assumptions of the article) answer: YES!

      --
      -I like my women like I like my tea: green-
  56. Black Holes by ZwJGR · · Score: 1

    The article quite sensibly predicts that matter will not reduce to a zero volume, with an infinite density (specifically that it require an infinite time).
    This does not mean that black hole-like objects do not exist, as a mass with 1/Inf volume (or whatever), is still going to look the same from a distance.
    Commendably, the article does not insist that the existance of black holes in real life has been proven (as it has not been proven). There has merely been a lot of astrophysical speculation (which may be correct, partially correct, or downright wrong, who can tell).

    On a personal not I find the entire argument that gravity is the root cause of all cosmological activity, rather odd, as gravity is the weakest force, and the sparse matter in space has been verified to be partially electrically charged (plasma).
    Gravity does not explain behaviour such as the observed "stringiness" of space, or phenomenon such as spiral galaxies clearly ejecting matter at right angles to the plane of rotation.
    That doesn't mean that gravity being the cause for many phenomenon is wrong, however it is often used as a The Meaning of Life type explanantion of everything; whereas including other forces/effects may produce a simpler or better answer (Occam's razor), particularly as EM forces are some 10^39 (I think) times stronger, and even a small charge imbalance can override gravity in certain situations.

    --
    There is no psychiatrist in the world like a puppy licking your face - Ben Williams
    1. Re:Black Holes by corser · · Score: 1

      EM forces will tend to cancel each other out because of the opposite charges. Gravity, however, always attracts. Even at massive distances two particle with mass will still attract each other.

  57. Work in progress... by Richard+Kirk · · Score: 1
    Early in the last century, people used to believe the nucleus was a loose 'plum pudding' of protons and neutrons that the electrons orgbited through as well as around. Rutherford was astonished when he got beta particles (helium nucleii) bouncing back from some tiny, hard central nucleus.

    What is the problem with a small nucleus? Well, if you believed in point charges then you would have light electrons orbiting a heavy nucleus like a small solar system. With a simple hydrogen atom, you would have a proton and an electron as a rotating dipole. With classical electrodynamics, this ought to radiate waves with the frequency of the orbit, and the electron should spiral into the nucleus, with the frequency rising as it goes. The pair of particules is not losing angular momentum, so it should get faster and faster untill some new force - perhaps the actual 'size' of the nucleus, stops it, or it collapses forever. We know this does not happen - there is no 'ultraviolet catastrophe', and the electron can radiate only a few discrete wavelengths, rather than a continuous, rising chirp. And thank goodness this is so, because the universe would be a very dull place, though we would not be around to complain about it.

    We now have quantum electrodynamics, which predicts what these particles do very nicely and to enormous precision. Many people find QED unsatisfactory because it seems to involve switching between looking at things as particules and as waves apparently at random, and it seems to need some faster than light magic to make it work, though we can never catch the universe doing it. Many popular science articles love dwelling on this 'mystic' aspect', but it doesn't help. Basically (a) small things are not like big things, and (b) the equations work, so we trust them in as far as scientists trust anything.

    With QED we can imagine what happens when we overcome the weak nuclear forces. We get neutron stars, where everything goes to one big squash of condensed matter. With black holes, we are squishing even harder, and then gravity (an inverse square force like electrostatic attraction) ought to run away, and all the particules ought to radiate gravitational waves and vanish towards a dimensionless dot. Only it can't do because there are other things like the angular momentum which must be preserved but cannot exist at a dot (okay, there are ways around this), and the entropy of the original particles, which ought to still be preserved somehow. Sound familiar? Yes - if we allow the particules to fall inwards forever then we get a paradox. Probably something else happens. What? We don't know.

    The logical place to look is something like string theory. If you look closely enough, particles may not be dots but lines or surfaces or all sorts of things. Nice idea, but not much help unless it actually predicts something.

    We think we can see black holes. We may know from observation about as much about the insides of black holes as was known about the structure of the nucleus back in 1920. Ask again in ninety years or so.

  58. PDFs by kohaku · · Score: 0

    PDF: the file format that can make a grown man scream.

  59. Ideally, the past not uncertain with all the data by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I do not know the physics well, but your idea of an uncertain past is based on not having all the variables and data. When we do not have all the variables, there will always be uncertainties. Creating things from random wont solve the problem, only getting the information, or just make our own assumptions, if possible, will.

    But when you do have all the variables, you can use the mathematics to replay the past, and the future, in the neat models of physicists. Of course, that is what they are: neat models, and in reality we never have all the information. Nevertheless, if all the other equations works so neat, then I can understand it is a problem to accept assymetry when dealing with black holes. Especially since mathematic equations wont really allow it.

    Entropy going down, the universe ordering itself, happens all the time locally. However, every energy-exchange will, if you look at the whole as a closed system, increase the entropy. If I write a book with my hands, I am also using my brain, which is consuming massive ressources. Luckily, nature is a better energy-recycler than us, and everything goes in circle as long as were smart and follow natures lead. But even our precious earth needs constant energy-boosts from the sun, to sustain life as we know it, just as my brain needs boosts from the food I eat, the air I breathe, etc.

    So on a whole scale, as a closed system, the entropy is always going up. But locally, entropy going down, is a sign of higher organisation of matter, of life, of intelligence.

    So if the entropy was on its lowest in the beginning of the universe, it is really a sign of the highest intelligence, sparking this whole creation: God

    Of course, its an age-old argument, and not a proof or anything, but it really makes you wonder doesnt it? It would make sense to classify everything according to their entropy-level, as "effective intelligence". Under such a scheme, God, or the beginning of the universe if you will, would be the most potent, most intelligent classification.

    Personally, I prefer to not use the word God, but I do believe everything has an innate intelligence, even stones.

  60. Black holes and the LHC by PeterPaul35 · · Score: 1

    I had high hopes that when CERN switched on the LHC in November of this year, they would inadvertently create a black hole, thus increasing the sales of my book, 'The Ancient Order of Moridura' (with a related theme of a nascent singularity created by a meteorite impact in Extremadura). But then I realised that the extinction of the planet - and probably the solar system - would prevent me from collecting my royalties. Life can be unfair sometimes! However, doomsday has been postponed until April/May of 2008 because of problems with magnets. The Higgs boson must be chuckling quietly in interstellar space, its anonymity preserved for a little longer. http://moridura.blogspot.com/ regards Peter Curran Edinburgh, Scotland

  61. Be careful of assumptions yourself by Steeltoe · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Your own assumptions about the universe is just a belief mind you.
    You would like the universe to be like our models, of mathematics, that we created in order to understand and predict this universe. This mathematics is *within* the universe, so how this ever can be capable of holding all the parameters / the absolute truth, now *that* is irrational!

    So the whole premise, although very tempting, is just impossible. The universe does not exist out of mathematics, mathematics exists because of this universe! To think any differently is perverse, and will only cloud your own judgement and mind. We must always be open to new stuff in order to advance true science, and not dogma.

    Free-will or not, has nothing to do with it. The quantum-level is so low a level, that when we observe something, we irrevocably change the state. If we measure it a different way, we change the state in a different way. So wether we have free will or not, we can measure things differently, and the way we do it, will affect the result differently.

    Wether we choose it by "free will", or by magic, or by rolling a dice, is just philosophy and has nothing to do with physics. You can always say this was predetermined, but the argument is that if we do it the other way, it will have different effects, that we *can* measure in experiments.

    Said in a different way: Whatever we do, or dont do, we irrevocably are part of the dynamics of the universe. We would maybe like to be totally impartial observers, but when the observing itself changes the universe, how can we ever separate us from the rest of the entire universe? If you follow this logic, which yourself started, you will come to conclusions that borders on the religious, wether you like it or not. That were responsible for what we do, or dont do, even if its just observing.

    So wether we have free-will or not, which is just a matter of frame of reference, where information comes from or not (we really do not know). But we have proof that we are irrevocably part of this universe and influencing everything in it, even just by observing.

    So to have hope to understand such a changing system logically and reasonably, we first have to understand our self.

    1. Re:Be careful of assumptions yourself by TropicalCoder · · Score: 1

      Very well spoken. It's a pity the moderators haven't noticed (yet).

      So to have hope to understand such a changing system logically and reasonably, we first have to understand our self.

      When contemplating self, who is it that is doing the contemplating? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Who watches the watcher?) When contemplating self, we see ourselves reflected in an infinite hall of mirrors. Thus we arrive at paradox.

      It was once proposed that if we attempt to travel in a straight line through this universe for a long enough time, eventually we will come back to where we started. Later, when it was learned that the universe is expanding at an ever accelerating pace, I suppose that we would never reach the 'other end of the universe'. I see a parallel in what I have just said with trying to fathom what lies beyond the event horizon. Whether that paradox is resolved or not, there will always be another awaiting us beyond the next bend, and we will never arrive to comprehend the universe. It will forever remain 'mystery'. Science relies on reduction to illuminate a part of the whole, but by its very nature, can never explain the whole. In the end, it's every man for himself to create some meaning in his life as best he can. By choosing to measure the state of one of a pair of entangled photons, you have effected the state of the other. The choices you make in life have a profound effect on your ultimate destiny, and ultimately an impact on the entire universe. Since science is an inadequate tool for holistic comprehension, we are left in the end with nothing better to rely on than philosophy, religion, and mysticism. Don't try to make sense out of this, because what I am speaking of cannot be made 'sense' of. It can only be expressed in poetry or music. All truth is reflected in the form of a lotus blossom. Now I'm speaking gibberish... or poetry, to be more kind to myself. I'm sorry, I am not too sure what I wanted to say, or if I really want to plunge into this right now after all. The parent spoke so eloquently, but I have come up short. If you found a grain of something useful in what I just said that is all that matters.

    2. Re:Be careful of assumptions yourself by Liquidrage · · Score: 1

      Free-will or not, has nothing to do with it. The quantum-level is so low a level, that when we observe something, we irrevocably change the state. If we measure it a different way, we change the state in a different way. So wether we have free will or not, we can measure things differently, and the way we do it, will affect the result differently.

      That is not what I was questioning. It is obvious that the act of measuring changes the outcome and it is impossible to do otherwise. What I question, and am perfectly valid in doing so, is the role of the observer in order for an outcome to exist. And that *is* based soley no the assumed free-will of the observer.

      While many people currently believe determinism to be impossible based on past QM experiments, that is not the case. What is the case is that if humans have true free-will then the experiments have shown this. But why should we assume true free-will? Without that assumption, for us to say that everything, inlcuding us, is pre-determined is perfectly valid as is the most simple and obvious interpretation.

    3. Re:Be careful of assumptions yourself by Steeltoe · · Score: 1

      In the bigger picture, you can never entirely disprove of anything. So how can you disprove free-will, or determinism?

      Its all a mental game. To go in favour of one, you lose perspective.

      Without an observer, _you_ have / observe nothing.

      Those saying deteminism is impossible, its bogus, because maybe an higher abstraction / system will show it is all determined? With more information, this might be discovered at a later date.

      Those saying we have free-will, its also bogus, because you cannot disprove of it since science will never end at a final conclusion about this never-ending universe. Where does it all come from? If entropy going down, is a sign of intelligence, and the universe is always going upwards in entropy (chaos)? Wouldnt that signify (not prove), that the highest intelligence was in the beginning of the universe, when entropy was at the lowest?

      The wise ones, will always believe in free-will, and know it is just a belief, because it is very convenient in order to take responsibility for your life. It may be a convenient illusion, or it might be truth. But the result is a better life. (And with "result" we assume we had a choice in the first place! ;)

      This is probably not what you had in mind either, but this is the only meaningful conclusion I can come up with now on the subject.

  62. Why is there a paradox in black holes? by master_p · · Score: 1

    A black hole does not mean matter vanishes...if it did, the law of physics that states 'energy is never lost or created, it simply changes shape' would be violated. So where is the paradox? the matter that falls into a black hole is crushed and compressed due to the enormous gravity...but it is not lost, it stays there forever.

  63. Poul Anderson used this in a short story in 1968 by Mike+Van+Pelt · · Score: 1
    Poul Anderson's Nebula award nominated short story "Kyrie" used the idea that it took infinite time to fall into a black hole.

    This story was published in 1968.

  64. Sad by wiredog · · Score: 1
    A Slashdot article on black holes, with no goatse link.

    Slashbots these days. Boring, boring, boring. No hot grits, no Natalie Portman naked and petrified, no goatse links.

    Oh, for the halcyon days of OGG THE OPEN SOURCE CAVEMAN!

  65. Re:Poul Anderson used this in a short story in 196 by MontyApollo · · Score: 1

    I have not read that short story, but there may be some confusion about what is actually new in the article and what specific idea the short story was employing. The summary states an old concept and a new concept in the same sentence so there has been some confusion here concerning this. Time dilation effects have been known about since General Relativity was first formulated.

    Read over some of the posts above, particulary the "I'm Confused" thread for a better explanation about what part is the new part.

  66. Renaming by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I believe this theory should be renamed the Katamari theory of event horizons.

  67. For what it may be worth... by VValdo · · Score: 1
    Here's a great lecture on this topic.

    The description:

    The fabulously energetic Princeton theoretical physicist Leonard Susskind and one the founders of string theory returns with an encore presentation about his disagreement with Stephen Hawking: whether collapsing stars which form black holes not only make matter disappear but all information as well. Does it matter? It's one of the major battle lines among people who think about what makes the universe tick.

    W
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    This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
  68. Re:Ideally, the past not uncertain with all the da by Pfhorrest · · Score: 1

    In quantum physics, there are certain questions about the physical universe which are in principle unanswerable - it's not just a matter of needing better equipment or experimental methods, you just cannot, in principle, ever get that information - and in such cases, it's held that said information in fact does not exist at all. Take radioactive decay, a prime example: supposedly it is a truly random process, such that even if you knew the complete state of the universe right now, ever bit of information about it, you could not deduce whether any given atom of Carbon-14 will decay into Carbon-12 in the next second or not, so it must not yet be a fact about the universe that that atom will (or will not) decay, since by hypothesis you know all the information there is to know, but you don't know that. As such, the unobserved future is in "superposition" - the atom both will and will not decay (or neither; both phrasings are somewhat loose and innacurate from what I'm told), until that time comes to pass and we can see whether or not it does, at which point there is some fact about the matter.

    This applies equally well to unobserved things in the present, as demonstrated by double-slit experiments demonstrating wave-particle duality and its relation to observation. Because of things like this, you get some weird results like the Schrodinger's Cat thought experiment, where an unobserved cat whose possible death is tied to the decay of an unobserved radioisotope is simultaneously alive and dead (or, again, neither; it's in a state of quantum superposition). Another present fact you cannot possibly determine (which information, thus, does not in fact exist) is the precise position and velocity of any given particle; the more determined the position, the less determined the velocity, and vice versa.

    Thus, as past events outside our light cone (things which occurred far enough away and recently enough that there's been no chance for their light to reach us) are in principle unobservable right now (until such a time as they come to be observable, just like the possible future decay of our Carbon 14 atom), then right now there is no fact of the matter, no information in the universe, about whether such events occurred, and it's just as much a matter of chance which past will turn out to have occurred as it is a matter of chance which future will occur.

    As this relates to black holes, if information really is destroyed when things fall into one, then that black hole has, in effect, a very random past, i.e. it does not follow from the present state of the black hole (and the rest of the universe it's in) that it has any particular history, precisely as it does not follow from the present state of a given Carbon-14 atom (and the rest of the universe it's in) that it will or will not decay at any given moment. That information about the past does not exist anywhere in the universe (it's not just a matter of it not existing in our minds), and so there is no fact of the matter at all about which past actually occurred.

    Just as relativity was a huge push for eternalism (a.k.a. "block time"; the position that the past and future are just as real as the present), quantum theory is a big push for presentism (the position that there really are no true statements about the past or the future at all; only the present is real), and I for one am quite eager to see how these two are eventually reconciled, for I find myself thinking sometimes as an eternalist and sometimes as a presentist and they seem, despite the apparent contradictions, somehow reconcilable, if only someone could manage to articulate how...

    --
    -Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
    "I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
  69. Pretty good, considering it's not a theory by loqi · · Score: 1

    And that's the best they can come up with as a way to prove Many-Worlds? Russian Roulette with a quantum trigger?

    Actually, yes it is. There's a reason it's called MW(Interpretation) and not MW(Theory), you know. A theory admits evidence. This is just an interesting edge case of what you can rightly consider evidence, related to the concepts in question.

    --
    If other reasons we do lack, we swear no one will die when we attack