Laser Light Re-creates 'Black Holes' in the Lab

yodasz writes "The New Scientist reports that a team of researchers from the UK were able to recreate a black hole's event horizon in the lab by firing a laser pulse down an optical fibre. The team's observations confirm predictions made by cosmologists and now they are trying to prove Hawking's hypothesis of escaping particles, dubbed Hawking radiation. 'The first pulse distorts the optical properties of the fibre simply by traveling through it. This distortion forces the speedy probe wave to slow down dramatically when it catches up with the slower pulse and tries to move through it. In fact, the probe wave becomes trapped and can never overtake the pulse's leading edge, which effectively becomes a black hole event horizon, beyond which light cannot escape.'"

Comments

Black Hole

[gammygator]

As long as they didn't create a real black hole.

That would suck.

Re:Black Hole

[CSMatt]

Well it certainly wouldn't blow.

Re:Black Hole

[sm62704]

So do the white ones. Oh you're talking about interstellar phenomena, never mind.

Re:Black Hole

[explosivejared]

Given that this experiment seems to back up hawking radiation, it's fairly reasonable to say that creating a black hole this small would not suck, but instead be pretty cool. Evaporation would take care of the black hole before it became a problem. Remember, that these experiments are still low energy, and low mass (very much so) when compared to natural occurences of black holes.

Re:Black Hole

[spidercoz]

ugh, dude, did you RTFA? this experiment had nothing to do with black holes, singularities, Hawking radiation, or any kind of mass. It was a trick of optics to produce an ANALOGUE of an event horizon

it is currently IMPOSSIBLE to produce any kind of singularity. The LHC has a chance, infinitesimal, to do so, but that's still quite a ways off.

Re:Black Hole

[explosivejared]

I did read the article, I was responding to the parent's idea about creating a black hole. Realize it was all tongue in cheek.

Re:Black Hole

[Anonymous Coward]

A journey that begins where everything ends... cue the music http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078869/

Re:Black Hole

[mtmra70]

You must have missed the epsiode of Atlantis where the blob of replicators was "suppose to take care of itself before it became a problem".

Re:Black Hole

[lanonyme]

Yes, like int the Dan simmons' book : Hyperion and its '08' error. A laboratory black hole story....

Re:Black Hole

[Anonymous Coward]

I saw that episode the first time they did it in Stargate SG-1.

Re:Black Hole

[utnapistim]

it is currently IMPOSSIBLE to produce any kind of singularity.

Ok wise guy, then explain Chuck Norris!

Re:Black Hole

[Brikus]

Chuck Noris was not produced, he has always been.

Re:Black Hole

[Sleepy]

Ugh, dude... did you RTFC (read the comment) you replied to? Did you read what he was replying to?

Obviously not. Don't flame people for what you alone are guilty of... it makes people wince. :)

Re:Black Hole

[ndogg]

Yeah, but only in the metaphorical.

Re:Black Hole

[spidercoz]

damn, you got me. I gotta go call Hawking.

Re:Black Hole

[spidercoz]

I did, I just felt the commenter's tongue had missed his cheek and went up his nose.

Re:Black Hole

[Anonymous Coward]

Every year the federal government release a black hole, it's called the budget. No tax dollars can escape it.

Re:Black Hole

[aasmodeus]

Dude, that was heavy.

Re:Black Hole

[a.Celtic.Cormudgeon]

Hmmm... Perhaps you have used an unfortunate choice of words. You say on the one hand that it is "currently impossible to produce any kind of singularity", and on the other,"the LHC has a chance, infinitesimal, to do so...". However infinitesimal the chance (i.e., the possibility) remains that a singularity of any kind may be produced, there still remains that possibility, how infinitesimal the possibility is. In effect, what you are actually saying is: "While it is currently impossible to produce a singularity..it is currently possible to do it..." Talk about your oxymorons... Please check your logic from now on?

Re:Black Hole

[orclevegam]

I think he meant that it's currently impossible, but once the LHC is finished and operational it might be possible.

Re:Black Hole

[arminw]

......natural occurences of black holes.......

Where? Nobody has yet seen direct evidence of such a theoretical fairy tale. Not only that, but black holes supposedly are based on the gravitational interaction. Anything with lasers and light is based on the electric interaction.

It's just too bad that so much of some sciences today are based on fancy computerized mathematics coming from somebody's fertile imagination, rather than observations and experiments. Often data is INTERPRETED to fit currently fashionable theories, but, even though the data is true, the interpretation is false since it tries to make the data fit a pet theory.

A good example of this is the Hubble interpretation that the fact of the red shift is due to the doppler effect. Different interpretations of that ONE fact make a fundamental change in our understanding of the universe in light of the data we received since the space age began. Such other than the current "accepted" cause of the red shift demolishes much of current cosmological dogma. The "Big Bang", dark matter/energy, Oort clouds as the birth place of comets are all fancy mathematical constructs, made unnecessary by other interpretation of the data. Some cosmology theorists don't know which end of a telescope to stick their eyeballs on, since they have never seen one except maybe in a book.

Nothing has really changed from the days of Copernicus and Kepler. They were persecuted and ridiculed for their then radical ideas, based on real observations, not fanciful math. Today, scientists who promulgate foundation rocking new concepts and promising new avenues of real research, are denied, by the scientific establishment, publication and funding. Science today is less and less interested in discovering truth, because there is always the danger that such truth will demolish cherished dogma.

Re:Black Hole

[Burnhard]

If events like that can create black holes, then they are being created all the time in our atmosphere when particles with orders of magnitude more energy than we will every produce in a collider, enter it.

Re:Black Hole

[Rude Turnip]

Oh Christ...last summer called, they want their meme back.

Re:Black Hole

[cHiphead]

In the immortal words of Ash from Evil Dead 2... HOW DO YOU TURN IT OFF!?!?

Re:Black Hole

[harkabeeparolyn]

So if the LHC succeeds in creating a black hole and if Hawking is wrong about the radiation then we're all as good as dead? They must be stopped. Someone should ask Barack Obama what he's going to do about it when he becomes President.

Re:Black Hole

[pugugly]

I will grant that the question of *what* is the simplest explanation is often up for grabs. But *looking* for the simplest explanation is *not* the same as forcing data to fit 'currently fashionable theories'. By *that* logic, we should never have bothered even looking for any of the predictions of Relativity - because if there's any more pure example of a mathematical theory being created from whole cloth than Relativity, I can't imagine what it would be.

How sad that we need to shoehorn observations about the curvature of light and time dilation into this fairy tale, when *obviously* Newtonian mechanics is far more born out by the observational data - {G}

It's a silly way to even phrase it. If a theory predicts something new, and by golly when you look for it, you find that to be the case, then it's fair to take that as a point in favor of the theory. That's not 'interpreting data to fit a theory'.

Sorry - but your 'insightful' post seems to me to be just one step from claiming the energy crisis is easily solvable by zero-point energy, if it weren't for those brilliant researchers being suppressed by 'The Man'.

Pug (A Faithful Minion of 'The Man', suppressing people everywhere!)

Re:Black Hole

[Marcos Eliziario]

If you are worried about that experiment, just spread the rumor that it's related to stem cells being used to help gay couples marry and Fox News will do the rest for you. For added effect say that of the researchers is an mexican illegal alien stealing the job from an american scientist.

Re:Black Hole

[Hucko]

What is old is new? I remember this meme from when Texas Walker Ranger was on TV. That would be a few years ago now. 1995?

Re:Black Hole

[Anonymous Coward]

Steroids.

Sorry, you'll probably be sad to know that the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus are fake too.

Re:Black Hole

[B3ryllium]

There was never a big bang - Chuck Norris simply stubbed his toe.

This event has never been repeated.

Re:Black Hole

[Anonymous Coward]

"If you are worried about that experiment, just spread the rumor that it's related to stem cells"

Or else, that Bin Laden expects to hide within once it's created so CIA can never get to him. That would do it too.

Re:Black Hole

[Anonymous Coward]

it is currently IMPOSSIBLE to produce any kind of singularity Still in denial, eh? It's ok, I'm sure I'd feel the same way if my mom had tried to feed me to a black hole minutes after my birth. You will never forget that day though... any man who's had his balls that close to an event horizon can tell you it's not a memory that ever goes away.

Signed,

The Man Who Lost a Testicle to a Black Hole

Re:Black Hole

[arminw]

.....we need to shoehorn observations about the curvature of light and time dilation into this fairy tale.......

The time dilation and curving of light, supposedly by the gravity of the sun are two separate parts of Einstein's theory.

Neither of these two parts have anything to do with gravity however. The fact is that, yes, light does curve as it passes close to the sun. This data has been INTERPRETED to be caused by gravity. However, since light is involved with the electric interaction, it is also possible that the light would be affected by interacting with the electric and magnetic fields of the sun and the large electric currents flowing in/out/around the sun. We know from experiments that light and particle beams strongly interact. The electrical force is at least 36 orders of magnitude greater than the gravitational interaction.

We also know from experiments that as particles are accelerated to near the speed of light, there is a time dilation effect EXACTLY as Dr. Einstein predicted mathematically. Therefore his math is of great value because it, unlike so much mathematical gymnastics today, has been experimentally verified innumerable times and in may ways. Even so, the time dilation is independent of gravity, but has been demonstrated to occur in an accelerating ELECTRIC field.

Einstein in fact was singularly unsuccessful in including gravity into his otherwise experimentally well tested theories.

Re:Black Hole

[madbawa]

Norris was created using a roundhouse kick by Bruce Schneier. The semantics of the word "impossible" do not apply to him. So its ok.

Re:Black Hole

[bh_doc]

Neither of these two parts have anything to do with gravity however. The fact is that, yes, light does curve as it passes close to the sun. This data has been INTERPRETED to be caused by gravity. However, since light is involved with the electric interaction, it is also possible that the light would be affected by interacting with the electric and magnetic fields of the sun and the large electric currents flowing in/out/around the sun. We know from experiments that light and particle beams strongly interact. The electrical force is at least 36 orders of magnitude greater than the gravitational interaction.

You really think that no-one's thought of this, and taken any such effect into account? Or do you think that they must be being suppressed by someone ("the man") for some reason (lord only knows)?

You really think scientists care that much about dogma?

-1 Nutbag.

Re:Black Hole

[arminw]

... Or do you think that they must be being suppressed by someone.....

Sort of, similar to the way the scientific establishment has suppressed radical ideas until the later, sometimes much later became mainstream.

Scientists are human and as such often do care for dogma more than data. This always been and will always be.

Presently, mainstream cosmological theories largely ignore the electric force as a major, often dominant factor in the operation of the large scale universe. There are two forces at work in the large scale universe. One is gravity and the other is the electric interaction. The latter is mostly ignored in today's cosmological theories. This is why modern space probes deliver so many puzzling "surprises" that have no good explanation if the electric interaction is ignored.

Re:Black Hole

[tm2b]

Nothing has really changed from the days of Copernicus and Kepler. They were persecuted and ridiculed for their then radical ideas, based on real observations, not fanciful math. Today, scientists who promulgate foundation rocking new concepts and promising new avenues of real research, are denied, by the scientific establishment, publication and funding. Science today is less and less interested in discovering truth, because there is always the danger that such truth will demolish cherished dogma.

"They laughed at Galileo, they laughed at Columbus, but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." - Carl Sagan

Re:Black Hole

[Fex303]

Presently, mainstream cosmological theories largely ignore the electric force as a major, often dominant factor in the operation of the large scale universe.

Oh, you're an electric universe nutjob. Why didn't you just say so?

Re:Black Hole

[arminw]

.....Oh, you're an electric universe nutjob......

See, there you go showing exactly the same attitude the majority of believers like you showed to people like Galileo, Kepler, Copernicus and others who looked at the same universe as the crowd and saw something that did not fit into the popular dogmas of the time.

Most startling progress and civilization changing discoveries in EVERY field were NEVER made by the crowd which simply accepted the consensus. Dead fish ALWAYS float down stream. Only the living ones struggle against the currents and eventually triumph over all obstacles in the river. Life and science is that way also.

Re:Black Hole

[pugugly]

Riiightttt.

Sorry, if only I had known I was dealing with the next Einstein, Galileo, Cochrane - then I would have taken you seriously.

Pug

Re:Black Hole

[Fex303]

Dead fish ALWAYS float down stream. Only the living ones struggle against the currents and eventually triumph over all obstacles in the river. Life and science is that way also.

Yes, but sometime you're just swimming the wrong way. You make it sound like if people are mocking your theories and the stream is against you, then you must be on the right track. Sorry, but that's simply not the case.

Re:Black Hole

[arminw]

......if people are mocking your theories........

Well this stuff about "The Electric Universe" are not MY theories. We are however getting a lot of data from modern space probes can can be explained much better if the electric force as well as gravity are BOTH taken into account. If gravity is considered alone the data we get is much more puzzling.

All of the rocky bodies of the solar system observed so far, have craters of various sizes. We have several of them here on Earth, like the one in Arizona.

Currently accepted theory gives impacts of chunks of matter from space as their cause. If that were the ONLY cause, then why is is that no materials whatsoever, foreign to the area of the crater are found? It seems that all traces of the supposedly impacting object evaporated without a trace. That vaporization is in fact the conventional explanation of this absence.

We know that electricity, such as lightening can also make craters. Welding and discharge machining make use of this capability. If there are charge imbalances between celestial objects, these can be equalized between them upon close encounters by means of catastrophic discharge events. Outer space is not an insulator, but is filled with charged particles. Sometimes the sun sends large electrical currents our way that cause the northern lights and on occasion disrupt our communications and power systems.

Electric fields and forces are transient phenomena, while gravity is sure and steady. Gravity accounts for the steady state of orbits, but is far too weak to cause any significant sudden disruption of planets and stars. There is plenty of evidence that the solar system has been through a rather violent phase not as far back in time, as it is presently thought.

There are many myths about warring gods, as evidenced by terrifying phenomena, such as catastrophic celestial thunder bolts, in the heavens and on earth. It is not the myths themselves that interesting, but their consistency of their central elements, not matter what location on earth these myths first originated.

We humans instinctively fear sudden terrifying events over which have no control. We much prefer the steady, slow and predictable, dependable as gravity. Electricity in nature displays itself suddenly, unpredictably. We still use language constructs, such as: "A Thunderbolt out of the blue". As scientists, we have to be cognizant of the fact that nature isn't always kind, evolving slowly and steadily, over vast amounts of time, but also, does at times make profound, deep and lasting changes with devastating suddenness. I'm not saying current theories are all wrong, but they certainly are incomplete.

Am I slow?

[TheGreatHegemon]

I'm not a physicist by any means, but I thought Hawking radiation had something to do with the force of gravity at the event horizon. This seems to me is just a bending of light.

Re:Am I slow?

[KublaiKhan]

As far as I can tell, they're using this technique to develop a technique to measure hawking radiation--which, you're correct, involves gravitational forces et al.

However, up until now, we had no real way to measure it unless we happened to see a small black hole blow up, something that we haven't figured out how to find.

Re:Am I slow?

[xanthines-R-yummy]

I was under the impression it was due to quantum particle pairs forming spontaneously. Under "normal" conditions we don't see these things because the pairs collide and sort of evaporate back to wherever the hell those things come from. However, in a black hole one of the particles escapes leaving the energy balance, well, in balance. The only reason that radiation escapes is that its partner went into the black hole absorbing some of its energy. Apparently, this phenomenon will cause all black holes to shrink to nothing over a long enough period of time.

I read about it in "The Physics of Star Trek", but Wikipedia has something on it too:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation

Re:Am I slow?

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't gravity just the attraction between two masses? In that case the particles in light have mass so a gravitational interaction between them can be observed.

And if this is wrong, fuck it, I am not a physicists.

Re:Am I slow?

[Ryvar]

IANAP, but as I understand it, Hawking radiation is caused by virtual particles pairs being created such that rather than annihilating each other and returning local space to a base 'zero' state, one of the pair escapes the singularity's gravity and the other does not.

One fortunate consequence of this is that smaller black holes 'evaporate' more quickly, and the microscopic black holes we'll likely be generating at the Large Hadron Collider will cease to exist before they've even had sufficient time to absorb a neutrino.

Re:Am I slow?

[orclevegam]

Yeah, I'm no physicist either, but I don't quite follow this. They haven't simulated a black hole at all, just the optics of its event horizon.

Artificial event horizon != Artificial black hole.

Somehow I highly doubt that even if they can get the fiberoptics to 1000 degrees centigrade and perform this experiment that they'll get any hawking radiation out of it.

Re:Am I slow?

[sm62704]

Wikipedia? What? You know that's not a reliable source of information. So I looked it up in the uncyclopedia:

A Black hole is an impossible object which makes the Universe work. It has the useful property of being "undetectable". It's like when your spouse comes home with a dent in the car, and blames it on an invisible black mass; the dent is proof of the black mass, but you can't, and never will be able to see it with CCTV cameras, but you know it's there. "Dark matter" is an equally undetectable force that causes cars to defy gravity, and hit invisible black holes. Astronomers will tell you that lots of them have spouses with dents in their cars, and can explain this is very technical terms, so you won't be able to understand why it's not possible.

Re:Am I slow?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hawking radiation is the idea that everywhere around us, particle-antiparticle pairs are created and annihilated over and over, and we never notice because the result of the activity is zero, unless it just so happens that the particles somehow can't be combined back together again, say, one of them materializes inside the event horizon of a black hole while the other one doesn't.

I presume they're trying to see if such a pair can be created in this situation where one particle is stuck behind the wave while the other one isn't.

Re:Am I slow?

[spidercoz]

you sir, are correct. well done. refreshing to see someone who pays attention and (holy shit!) looks up the occasional factoid

Re:Am I slow?

[Anonymous Coward]

Pardon my obvious bias, but you're absolutely dead on with your complaint - this is just one more example of condensed matter douchebags deluding themselves into thinking that they are doing something that has something to say about Real Physics as opposed to just solving another messy engineering problem. You see, the condensed matter folks know that their field has nothing to offer anyone in terms of actual understanding (that's not to say there aren't extremely useful applications, because there are), so they throw up crap like this all the time so they can point to it as an example of how they are doing all the things that the Real Physicists couldn't figure out how to do.

Re:Am I slow?

[orclevegam]

you sir, are correct. well done. refreshing to see someone who pays attention and (holy shit!) looks up the occasional factoid Looking up the occasional factoid? Hah, we don't need to do that, that's why we have the inter... uh... nevermind.

Re:Am I slow?

[FooAtWFU]

Yo. My old buddy Einstein called. Turns out: Gravity? Acceleration? Almost the exact same thing, as far as the Physics is concerned. Kinda zany, huh?

Without looking at the objects around you, there's no way to tell the difference between 1 G sitting on Earth and 1G of force from being propelled by a rocket through space.

Re:Am I slow?

[orclevegam]

Please look up cause and effect.

Re:Am I slow?

[click2005]

Hawking radiation is to do with Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and the creation of virtual particles (pairs like Quarks/Antiquarks, Electrons/Positrons, Neutrino/Antineutrino, Proton/Antiproton etc) that only exist for a negligible amount of time and they're impossible to detect directly. Usually they annihilate each other but if a pair is created near the event horizon, its possible that one part of the pair gets swallowed by the black hole and the other escapes. As multiple particles do this, they interact creating energy, photons & annihilate each other to create a thermal distribution of energies known as Hawking Radiation.

I saw part of The Teaching Company course covering this yesterday on Understanding The Universe.

Re:Am I slow?

[Jerf]

The bit that's missing from this article, and that completes the explanation of why this is interesting, is the question of information.

One of the open questions facing physics is whether the event horizon of a black hole destroys information. It's not just the event horizon itself that is interesting, the destruction of information is by itself a legitimately interesting question by itself.

If we can create an optical event horizon that also seems to destroy information, this may allow us to witness how the Universe responds to such information destruction. This is radically easier than creating a large enough black hole to observe these effects. Black hole horizons are interesting in many ways; this may allow us to extract and experiment on one aspect of them.

I've seen a few proposals for the creation of an optical black hole, this is the first claim I've seen that someone may have actually created one.

Re:Am I slow?

[Anonymous Coward]

nor a grammartologist.

Re:Am I slow?

[hasdikarlsam]

Yes, IF the hawking effect actually exists.
Given the consequences if they're wrong, though.. um, why are we in such a hurry? Can't we build this on mars or something?

Re:Am I slow?

[kvezach]

IANAP, but as I understand it, Hawking radiation is caused by virtual particles pairs being created such that rather than annihilating each other and returning local space to a base 'zero' state, one of the pair escapes the singularity's gravity and the other does not.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't that mean you could use artificial black holes to convert matter to energy? Dump some matter into the hole, and extract energy as the velocity (kinetic energy) of the Hawking radiation particles (as they surely must travel at some speed to escape the hole's gravity).

Re:Am I slow?

[SL Baur]

I thought Hawking radiation had something to do with the force of gravity at the event horizon No. Hawking radiation is due an application of the uncertainty principle. Nothing can escape from a black hole inside the event horizon, however the exact location of the event horizon cannot be measured precisely and if it is in fact variable within the limits of the uncertainty principle, some mass that was previously inside the black hole could find itself outside the black hole at some instant and could theoretically escape. That escaping mass is called Hawking radiation.

I'm not a physicist either, so I don't know exactly why this experiment would prove the existence of Hawking radiation.

Re:Am I slow?

[mako1138]

In general relativity, light follows geodesics -- straight lines in spacetime. Black holes bend spacetime, so they also bend light. (No, I didn't RTFA.)

Re:Am I slow?

[Thuktun]

If we can create an optical event horizon that also seems to destroy information, this may allow us to witness how the Universe responds to such information destruction. BSOD

Re:Am I slow?

[WilliamSChips]

You'd have to compress a Planck mass into a Planck length to do that. And that is very hard to do.

Re:Am I slow?

[arminw]

....they're impossible to detect directly.....

Not so. If you run a beam of electrons through a magnetic deflection, the will deflect in a particular direction with the degree of bending dependent on the magnetic field and the energy of the electrons. If you replace the electrons with positrons, they will deflect in the opposite direction. This also works with other charged particles and their anti-particles.

Has anybody EVER actually observed a black hole or something being swallowed up by one?

Re:Am I slow?

[nnnneedles]

microscopic black holes...some of these black holes grow to form the center point of an entire galaxy.

but that wont happen at the hardon collider, because the black hole doesn't have any mass near it to grow. It's not like it's being created on a big rock or anything..

Re:Am I slow?

[kvezach]

You'd have to compress a Planck mass into a Planck length to do that. And that is very hard to do.

To create the hole? "Ordinary" black holes form without starting off compressed to Planck length. They are obviously too cold to use for that kind of energy extraction scheme, but by making the hole as large as you want you can also make the density as low as you want, which would seem to disprove a hard (constant factor) limit.

Re:Am I slow?

[nnnneedles]

what I don't get about hawking radiation is why this effect would cause a black hole to evaporate.

From the descriptions it seems that these particles are being created spontanously outside the black hole, and one falls in. To me, that would mean that the black hole actually gains mass (one particle).

Re:Am I slow?

[click2005]

You might be right but the way I understood it, the two particles annihilate each other before its possible to detect them. They can be proven to exist by the way they interact with other particles (changing energy levels of hydrogen atoms & with the Casimir Effect) but detecting virtual particles directly violates the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

Re:Am I slow?

[pugugly]

I should think it would be *easy* to compress a Planck mass to a Planck length.

Indeed, have you ever tried to stretch a Planck mass over two or more Planck lengths? Now *that's* hard.

Especially attaching the 'lil Planck handgrips at the ends.

Pug

Re:Am I slow?

[pugugly]

No - we've only seen unimaginably dense and massive objects that throw large stars around like toys, ripping them apart with tidal stresses, which have no other detectable attributes when they aren't actively feeding on matter.

But, no, we haven't actually 'seen' one.

Pug

Re:Am I slow?

[glitch23]

One fortunate consequence of this is that smaller black holes 'evaporate' more quickly, and the microscopic black holes we'll likely be generating at the Large Hadron Collider will cease to exist before they've even had sufficient time to absorb a neutrino.

Although they do evaporate it can still take billions of years before they reduce to nothing. The black holes the LHC will create are going to evaporate so fast they won't have time to do anything really. They definitely won't have any adverse effects on the planet or the LHC itself.

Re:Am I slow?

[click2005]

The virtual particles created are a matching pair (particle & antiparticle) spontaneously created from nothing (a temporary quantum violation of the classical law of conservation of energy) that last for very short time periods before being annihilated. From our perspective (outside the black hole) the particle that escapes black hole is energy from nothing and the particle that is swallowed is negative energy. It doesn't matter if the particle or antiparticle is the one swallowed by the black hole, it still ends up being negative energy. I don't fully understand the last part myself (even after watching that lecture about 6 times) but then IANAP.

Re:Am I slow?

[zevans]

Slow? Sure you are. As thick as two short Plancks...

Re:Am I slow?

[arminw]

....which have no other detectable attributes.....

That is based on the assumption (belief) that the gravitational interaction is the only force of nature involved. It also assumes, that like we experience here on earth, that matter throughout the universe is electrically neutral. It happens that, by far, most matter in the cosmos consists of naked charged particles milling around in stars and zipping at near light speed through all of space. Since the electric force diminishes also by the inverse square law, just like gravity, such forces based on the electrical interaction must be taken into account also. Most of today's cosmology assumes (believes) that the electrical interaction of matter can be neglected because positive and negative charges tend to cancel each other at large distances.

We know from lab experiments that any time you have moving charges, a magnetic field is generated. In fact, we know of no other way that a magnetic field can exist, other than moving an electrical charge.

These flowing currents in turn tend to get focused and separated according to polarity by these self generated magnetic fields. We have measured values of such fields in the solar system. The earth's magnetic field focuses the huge electric currents from the sun. When these focused charges impinge upon our upper atmosphere, we get the phenomena of the northern lights above both poles. Sometimes, these electrical currents from the sun get strong enough to disrupt our communications systems and power grids.

Since the electric force is at least 36 orders of magnitude greater than gravity, it doesn't take much of a charge imbalance between two objects to generate enormous forces on and between such objects. We get a tiny sample of what slightly imbalanced electrical charges can do in a lightening strike.

There is no reason to assume that stars and planets are electrically neutral with respect to each other. The disruptive forces of even a relatively minor charge imbalance between galaxies, stars and planets can be more than enough to tear apart any form of matter. No black holes need apply for that job.

Re:Am I slow?

[muhadeeb]

Next thing you know, we'll have a Stargate which will be a white hole to go somewhere else. Time to get ready for star travel with out a space ship. Ooops , forgot, we need another one on the otherside

Re:Am I slow?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope.. just need to find Planck.

Re:Am I slow?

[pugugly]

That's just silly. You're postulating additional theoretical constraints to keep from dealing with an simple theory.

Bluntly, if *that* were the case that these imbalances in electrical charge were so common as to provide the same effects as a black hole -

A) We'd be having those issues locally, great lightning strikes from the Moon to the Earth, Jupiter destroying its satellites, et al. In other word, we wouldn't be here to argue about it.

B) Even if something disrupted the possibility of this as a local phenomenon - electromagnetism on such scales is hardly a quiet phenomenon - you would see stars repulsed by each other, great galactic 'sparks' though the giant molecular clouds.

C) As you mentioned - the electromagnetic forces are 36 orders of magnitude stronger than gravity - yet the orbital velocities of the stars orbiting the mass at the center of our galactic core are predictable using gravity - That the imbalance of our mysterious mass should, by odd coincidence, *exactly* match the orbits predicted using gravity as a guide. Well, if true then God is playing an awfully mean trick on Occam.

Fundamentally, you're attacking a simple and obvious theoretical construct, by invoking numerous entities that are completely not needed to explain the issue. I would submit to you sir that all theories are *not* gray - your's is in fact quite colorful - {G}.

Pug

Re:Am I slow?

[jeepien]

... but that wont happen at the hardon collider, because...

Can't believe that wasn't modded Funny.

Sounds safe

[192939495969798999]

That sounds safe, to reproduce the effects of the point at which all matter collapses into a virtual singularity. Where were they testing this again? Somewhere on Earth? Alrighty then... Taxi!

Re:Sounds safe

[KublaiKhan]

It's not like they're making an actual singularity--they're just taking advantage of some properties of optical fibres to make something that kindasorta acts like an event horizon from one side.

Re:Sounds safe

[orclevegam]

That sounds safe, to reproduce the effects of the point at which all matter collapses into a virtual singularity. Where were they testing this again? Somewhere on Earth? Alrighty then... Taxi! They aren't simulating a black hole, the title is misleading. They're simulating the optical properties of a black holes event horizon. Subtle but very important difference.

Re:Sounds safe

[sm62704]

Well, they can blow up the earth if they want to but PLEASE DON'T LET THEM RECITE POETRY!

Re:Sounds safe

[Anonymous Coward]

not until i find my towel

Re:Sounds safe

[BlueParrot]

The thing people don't realize with particle physics is that we are constantly bombarded by VASTLY higher energy particles than any of our accelerators can ever manage to produce. If there was even a minor possibility that particle collisions ( and yes, that includes bosons ) could destroy the planet then we would already be doomed from the vast quantity of cosmic rays that are hitting the earth's surface all the time. Basically whenever you hear about scientists trying to do some high energy particle physics collision, or similar high energy physics experiment, it is almost certain that the same type of reaction has occurred somewhere in the earth's atmosphere several times before. Since we are still here it is unlikely such research should be dangerous.

Re:Sounds safe

[chill]

They aren't simulating a black hole, the title is misleading. They're simulating the optical properties of a black holes event horizon. Subtle but very important difference.

Yeah, your way of describing it doesn't generate NEAR as many hits on the ads...um, article.

Re:Sounds safe

[__aamnbm3774]

but that would not be a true test then.

I can also 'simulate' a black hole's event horizon by putting a shining flashlight inside a sealed tin can.

You need extreme gravity to accurately replicate a black hole, not small pulses of radiation.

Re:Sounds safe

[Jugalator]

I agree, it's like comparing an actual stretching of a gaping asshole compared to only simulating the properties of the skin as it stretches.

Or something. Damn, I've been scarred by goatse for life. :-(

Re:Sounds safe

[mmalove]

Apparently, developing nuclear weapons with the capability to destroy the planet wasn't enough. Somehow the nations of the world have not yet asploded themselves. But perhaps with a loose black hole, we'll finally self destruct as a species, and maybe even take the sun with us.

I have to wonder - if every species that ever formed across the galaxy runs into that delimma at some point - that their science of destruction outranges their science of defense and mobility, and one crazy guy blows the whole thing to bits. I mean as it is we've developed the capability to pretty much destroy the only place in the universe we know we can survive - but we seem to be a long ways off from developing the technology in planetary terraforming or off-world survival to expand beyond the earth. In fact, our present means of transportation are pretty sad too. One loose cannon...

What if every black hole was actually once a scientifically advanced species that blew itself up making black holes?

Re:Sounds safe

[prockcore]

Black holes don't suck. They just have really really high gravity because of the huge amount of mass.

If I took a spoon, and somehow crushed it down to a singularity, I'd have a black hole with the same amount of mass and gravity as the spoon did. You could hold it in your hand.

Re:Sounds safe

[Kjella]

I'm not sure which Illuminati base you're heading to, but I'd suggest trying to find one in a different solar system. At any rate, does everyone else begin to be utterly sick and tired of the "whatcouldpossiblygowrong" tag? THERE IS NO SIGNIFICANT AMOUNT OF MASS INVOLVED AND NOTHING COULD GO EVEN REMOTELY INTERESTINGLY WRONG.

Re:Sounds safe

[OMNIpotusCOM]

Sonofabitch, you mean that the article, that I didn't read because I wouldn't understand, didn't talk about the same stuff in the little blurb up there that had a bunch of stuff that I had to look up and still don't understand any better after having done so? AND there's ads? Let's just shoot down a satellite.

Re:Sounds safe

[WilliamSChips]

It really counterpoints the surreality of the underlying metaphor.

Re:Sounds safe

[socratesone]

Yes, of course, it's not a REAL black hole...Uhh...

Oops, I forgot to carry the "2".

Re:Sounds safe

[neverutterwhen]

No. Black holes with a low mass evaporate. They do not magically get bigger and swallow up everything.

Re:Sounds safe

[zevans]

Not quite the same. The SURFACE gravity of the spoon would have changed. Which means bits of your hand would fall into it.

IANAP (never one around when you want one is there?) but I think the Hawking radiation goes faster at that sort of size of event horizon, and so your spoon will go pop quite soon.

Re:Sounds safe

[sm62704]

Score 0, offtopic? Damned near every comment I mande in this thread was modded "offtopic" by at least one asshat.

Who let somebody who never read Adams moderate anyway?

THIS comment is offtopic.

Re:Sounds safe

[sm62704]

Arthur? Is that you?

Re:Sounds safe

[WilliamSChips]

Actually, Arthur is my middle name. ;)

Re:Sounds safe

[sm62704]

My head just asploded. But then it unploded when I realised your last name isn't "Dent".

Let's hope

[Anonymous Coward]

the rest of the world catches up to this level of physics. Studied this since the first edition of de Witte and MSW, and it remains hot. Burn, lasers, burn!

Test Methodology

[Anonymous Coward]

Step 1: Fire laser into one end of optical fiber
Step 2: Hold other end up to eye and from that day on, "see" *black holes* like, everywhere
Step 4: PROFIT from higher scientific research? You must be joking...

Re:Test Methodology

[spitefulcrow]

Warning: do not look into laser with remaining good eye.

Re:Test Methodology

[kalirion]

Side effects include eye irritation, and death. Then there will be cake.

Re:Test Methodology

[htnprm]

The results of prolonged exposure to black holes are not part of this experiment.

Re:Test Methodology

[gijoel]

Warning: Do not touch black hole with remaining arm.

I don't get sending a "slow" and then "fast" wave

[stratjakt]

I thought light travelled at C and that was that.

What gives?

A black hole event horizon?

[SecurityGuy]

Not to be picky, but you do know there's a little bit more to the event horizon of a black hole than the fact that light can't get out of it? Let's not confuse interesting optical effects with singularities. They are...different.

Re:A black hole event horizon?

[TI-8477]

Specifically, an event horizon is a point beyond which events cannot affect the rest of the universe. another example of which is the expanding edge of the universe. One of the properties of an event horizon is that light cannot escape. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_horizon

Re:A black hole event horizon?

[Anonymous Coward]

indeed...

Re:A black hole event horizon?

[spidercoz]

I've heard it explained as a cosmological censor to block out the horrible violations of natural law that occur inside from the rest of the universe, always amused me

Re:A black hole event horizon?

[SQLGuru]

So, the "edge" of the universe is an event horizon and the "edge" of a black hole is an event horizon, therefore it isn't turtles all the way down, it's universes all the way down.....like matrioshka dolls (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matryoshka_doll)

Layne

Re:A black hole event horizon?

[frogzilla]

Why did you insert the...dramatic pause? Does it help...explain the difference?

Re:A black hole event horizon?

[fenrisulfur]

Bravo I think you just made the biggest understatement of the year. Indeed are they different.

Re:A black hole event horizon?

[pugugly]

Down with Censorship! I wanna see a Naked Singularity!! Borg Babes for everyone!

Pug

oblig futurama quote

[pak9rabid]

Bret: Pretty scrawny black hole. It must be hungry.
Cubert: Duh! Black holes don't need food.
Bret: Neither do nerds!

Cavitronics

[Wylfing]

I still maintain that Earth by David Brin is one of the best science fiction novels I have ever read. The eradication of privacy, the pervasive recording of everything by retirees, etc. Now we're just one step closer. Just release a few lab-made black holes and let them carve neural pathways in the planet with their decaying orbits.

Re:Cavitronics

[dtolman]

Except for the tiny detail that the black holes were too tiny to do any damage. To be big enough to suck the earth in from the inside, they'd need a pretty powerful gravitational field - anything lab produced would just disapate as it starves to death (earthly material is not dense enough to grow it substantially).

Fun sci-fi trash read though... he pretty much through every prediction he could think of at the wall and hoped they would stick.

Re:Cavitronics

[orclevegam]

To be big enough to suck the earth in from the inside, they'd need a pretty powerful gravitational field - anything lab produced would just disapate as it starves to death (earthly material is not dense enough to grow it substantially). Hmmmm... so does that mean black holes have a "critical mass" they need to achieve in order to keep from evaporating? Also, wouldn't this "critical mass" tend to vary depending on the density of the medium in which the black hole was embedded (as hinted at in your statement)? It's a rather interesting concept, although lets hope if they every try a Manhattan project style bomb around this principle that they do so out in space someplace we wouldn't mind losing.

The evil genius part of my brain is already trying to figure out what kind of math you would need to do in order to design a "planet killer" version of an artificial black hole. I guess the math for the minimum mass would work out to be the point at which the gravity field pulls in more matter at the planets average density than what's lost by evaporation off the surface of the black hole. Of course, since we don't even know if it really does evaporate for sure we can't get an accurate value for how fast it evaporates. Alternately since it's dependent on density of the medium would it increase the odds of eating the planet of you fired it into the core of the planet versus letting it hang out in the atmosphere?

Re:Cavitronics

[dtolman]

well - the effective minimal critical mass of a black hole is whatever amount of mass is required to get the Schwartzschild Radius (aka - area of no return - aka the size of your cosmic vacuum cleaner's mouth) bigger than elementary particles. If you're too small to suck in even an electron, you're not much of a beastly killing machine.

But going with your whole evil super weapon train of thought - a practical black hole weapon would have to be pretty massive. Like really really massive. I'm too lazy to do the math myself - but according to whoever edited wikipedia last, even an Earth massed black hole would be pretty tiny - its event horizon would be 9mm across. The gravitational effects would probably rip the Earth apart long before it could suck down any appreciable amount of mass (even though its only 9 mm across, its gravitational pull would be identical as an Earth massed object - so at 1 Earth radius, it would have a pull of 1 G).

If you want real fun with super science weapons, you'd can't beat relativistic kill vehicle: You speed marbles up to near light speed and shoot 'em off at targets - leaving continent sized craters on a planet with a weapon that can barely be detected, let alone stopped.

Re:Cavitronics

[orclevegam]

mmmm, yes, I'm well aware of relativistic weapons. Of course you can get a similar effect without having to put quite as much effort into it buy simply dropping a bundle of depleted uranium spikes from orbit. I'm voting orbital railguns for the win. Launch them all in such a way that their trajectories intersect at about 1m below ground level, and if you chuck them hard enough you can probably get them to come in at mach 8 or 9 without too much trouble. I'm thinking you setup the satellite with the railguns such that their facing away from each other (think very very shallow inverted V) then all you need to do is impart enough force in firing them that they eventually impact at the opposite side of the planet from where you launched them. Would need a thruster on the back of the satellite though as firing them would tend to kick it out into a higher orbit.

Re:Cavitronics

[mdenham]

As far as how big a black hole you'd need to eat the Earth, it's roughly half a lunar mass (which actually gives a black hole that's in rough equilibrium with the majority of the Earth's volume - you might wind up with some crust fragments at the end, but that's all).

So, as far as the project described way back in the grandparent post goes, you'd be wanting black holes of, more likely than not, roughly Junoan mass... but not more than about two thousand of them.

oblig

[ArieKremen]

Move on, nothing to be seen here ...

Tag?

[BrotherBeal]

Where's the 'whatcouldpossiblygowrong' tag when you need it?

Re:Tag?

[Anonymous Coward]

DIAF

Background info needed..

[lawaetf1]

could someone give me a little prep on this article.. A paragraph or two on how the universe works would be good. cheers. /obligatory

Re:Background info needed..

[imipak]

The story so far:

In the Beginning, the Universe was Created.

This has made a lot of people very angry, and been widely regarded as a bad move.

Many races believe that it was created by some sort of god, though the Jatravartid people of Viltvodle VI firmly believe that the entire universe was in fact sneezed out of the nose of a being called the Great Green Arkleseizure.

The Jatravartids, who live in perpetual fear of the time they call "The Coming of the Great White Hankerchief", are small blue creatures with more than fifty arms each, who are therefore unique in being the only race in history to have invented the aerosol deodorant before the wheel.

However, the Great Green Arkleseizure Theory was not widely accepted outside Viltvodle VI, and so...

I dunno what's sadder, me sitting here along eating frozen pizza on Valentine's day, or the fact that's all from memory - and that I just checked it back against the original radio shows, and I got it right?

OK, wiseguy, very good, you're very funny OK... it was a rhetorical question.

Re:Background info needed..

[ignavus]

The universe works pretty well, thanks.

No need for lots of paragraphs.

Old SF

[OpenSourced]

Does anybody remembers an old SF story in which a black hole is created and contained, and then somehow it _falls_ and start eating the Earth away? Cannot remember name or a author, but it gave me the creeps back then :o)

Re:Old SF

[jbeaupre]

Earth http://www.amazon.com/Earth-David-Brin/dp/055329024X

Re:Old SF

[Anonymous Coward]

Holy ubiquitous SF trope, Batman!

I think you mean "The Hole Man", Larry Niven, 1974 (except this took place on Mars)

Re:Old SF

[RetiredMidn]

Does anybody remembers an old SF story in which a black hole is created and contained, and then somehow it _falls_ and start eating the Earth away? Cannot remember name or a author, but it gave me the creeps back then :o)

I remember reading a short story, probably in the 60's, with a plot like this. The story starts with investigators trying to understand a rash of mysterious structural failures around the world, and tracing them to tiny vertical holes drilled through whatever failed; including buildings. It's ultimately traced to a scientist who had been attempting to create a black hole in a mountaintop laboratory. The black hole couldn't be contained or supported (because it sucked in the material), and was basically in an "orbit" that carried it down to the center of the earth, back out the other side until it reached the same distance on the other side, and so on, like a pendulum. The rotation of the earth cause it to cross the surface at various places. The hole was becoming more destructive as it consumed more material and became larger, and the earth was doomed unless a way could be found to get rid of it. I think the story ended without resolution (before the earth is destroyed).

I got the creeps, too. I hope someone finds the title and author.

Re:Old SF

[OpenSourced]

I think it's the same story, yes, and I think the AC is also right, the story sure could be "The hole man", by good old Niven. I remember the part about knowing that the black hole was falling to the center of the planet (it might well be Mars, not Earth), and knowing that it was getting some atoms here and there, getting bigger and bigger. Knowing that in time the quakes would start...

I sure hope nothing like that happens with these experiments.

Re:Old SF

[Tipa]

If that's the story I'm thinking of, a nerdy scientist, part of an expedition to Mars, investigating an alien communication device is being teased by a bullying coworker because he believes the device is using gravity waves as a carrier by vibrating a micro black hole. To prove he's right, he turns off the magnetic containment, releasing it to eventually devour the planet, and by the way killing the bully.

James P. Hogan's "Thrice Upon a Time" discusses a prototype fusion reactor which accidentally sends two million quantum black holes into orbit within the earth. Luckily, they have a Decwriter-based time machine to help.

Re:Old SF

[dacut]

According to the editorial review, "Weaving an epic of complex dimensions, Brin ( Startide Rising ) plaits initially divergent story lines, all set in the year 2038."

Please. In 2038, black holes eating away at the earth will be the least of our concerns.

Re:Old SF

[Tablizer]

Does anybody remembers an old SF story in which a black hole is created and contained, and then somehow it _falls_ and start eating the Earth away?

We call it "Middle-East Policy".

Re:Old SF

[meringuoid]

The black hole couldn't be contained or supported (because it sucked in the material), and was basically in an "orbit" that carried it down to the center of the earth, back out the other side until it reached the same distance on the other side, and so on, like a pendulum. The rotation of the earth cause it to cross the surface at various places. The hole was becoming more destructive as it consumed more material and became larger, and the earth was doomed unless a way could be found to get rid of it.

OK, important safety tip for future reference. When conducting experiments that may result in the creation of a black hole, ensure that the experimental frame of reference is such that the hole's orbit around the centre of the earth will give it a gravitational boost, and accelerate it away at the cost of a little rotational angular momentum. It's just a matter of pointing the particle accelerator the right way, and is a cheap and easy way to avoid embarrassing workplace mishaps.

Re:Old SF

[RetiredMidn]

Mars was not part of the story I remember.

Re:Old SF

[Fian]

another possibility:

http://www.amazon.com/Doomsday-Effect-Thomas-Wren/dp/0671655795/

Uh oh.

[Anonymous Coward]

The team calculates that their laser black hole shares this property, and that it will "radiate" photons if it heats up to about 1000 degrees centigrade.

Wouldn't the fiber (or something) melt at that temprature?

Re:Uh oh.

[Bloodoflethe]

I wish I could give you a better response than this but: the important consideration is not whether it would melt or not, but that the shape and Index of Refraction between the fiber's core and cladding are maintained. (That's the easy answer.) Also, fiber is heated to about 1800 kelvins (1527 Celsius) for the purposes of manufacturing the fiber (really detailed but interesting process).

Re:Uh oh.

[Bloodoflethe]

How the hell is this offtopic? Someone needs to beat that moderator with a stick.

Re:Uh oh.

[Bloodoflethe]

I thought it might be helpful to point out that Fusion splicing uses an arc welder that heats the fiber to 2k Celsius to fuse the fibers together.

Pior Art

[Anonymous Coward]

This has effect can be observed with cars and trains in tunnels without creating a "simulated black hole"
Why should light (a wave and a particle) behave any differently in a confined medium. *scratches head*

black hole analogy is a stretch

[xPsi]

The experiment is cool, but as far as I can tell, this is nothing like a black hole in the cosmological sense. Simply reproducing one superficial property of black hole ("light cannot escape") does not make it a gravitational singularity with an event horizon and its associated properties. For example, I seriously doubt electron-positron conversions in their light cavity would behave at all like said conversions at a real event horizon since the charged particles would be subject to very different kinds of forces from those near a real black hole. Also, Hawking radiation is related to black hole evaporation. This would not occur with the lasers in an analogous way because the mechanics of this light bubble "evaporation" is totally different. It sounds to me like a case of one subfield (photonics) sexing up their lingo by adopting the lingo of another subfield (general relativity) to get press. IAAP, but not a cosmologists/GR expert, so I'm willing to stand corrected.

Re:black hole analogy is a stretch

[orclevegam]

It sounds to me like a case of one subfield (photonics) sexing up their lingo by adopting the lingo of another subfield (general relativity) to get press. IAAP, but not a cosmologists/GR expert, so I'm willing to stand corrected. IANAP, but even I came to the same conclusion. When your press release is having holes poked in it by laymen there's something a bit fishy going on.

Re:black hole analogy is a stretch

[Biff Stu]

I am also perplexed. I to am not an expert on relativity & cosmology, but I know a thing or two about nonlinear optics. An intense light field can modify the index of refraction of the medium through which it's propagating. This is known as the AC or optical Kerr effect. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerr_effect/ The second light pulse will gradually encounter a higher index as it approaches the first pulse and therefore slow down. While I know nothing about Hawking radiation, it seems like gravity must be somehow involved, and this experiment is all about electromagnetic forces.

Re:black hole analogy is a stretch

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you read the article? (I'm new here...)

The authors don't claim to have created a cosmological black hole or gravitational singularity. They claim to have created an artifical event horizon. The two are not the same thing. If you buy into the "cosmological censorship" argument to fear naked singularities, you might accept that all singularities require an event horizon. But that doesn't mean that all event horizons require forming a singularity.

The value lies in the ability to study properties of the event horizon without the bother of having that pesky black hole lurking over your shoulder.

Re:black hole analogy is a stretch

[orclevegam]

That would be all well and good, but then the article goes on to speculate about using this artificial event horizon to try to generate hawking radiation. It's that second point (as well as the terribly misleading title) that everyone is scratching their heads over.

Re:black hole analogy is a stretch

[mattxb]

Hmm, here is some random page from Google on 'Optical Black Holes' http://www.phys.lsu.edu/mog/mog15/node10.html.

There is an early (2000) paper by Leonhardt (that I haven't read fully yet) talking about the theory behind this in Physical Review Letters Phys. Rev. Lett. 84 822 (2000), along with some follow-up discussion explaining why this model might not be, strictly, a 'black-hole' Phys. Rev. Lett. 85 5252 (2000) (but one which describes how it may be adapted to become a model of a black hole).

That Visser critique has a couple of references to papers by W. G. Unruh, who tries to claim, as far as I can tell, that black-hole evaporation processes may be observable and modelled by a sonic black hole: Phys. Rev. Lett. 46 1351 (1981), Phys. Rev. D 51 2827 (1995).

This work is presumably making a transition from sonic black hole models, to optical black hole models.

Re:black hole analogy is a stretch

[mattxb]

As a follow up to my own comment, arXiv has what looks like the (a?) preprint for this current optical-fibre work arXiv:0711.4796v2 [gr-qc]?

Re:black hole analogy is a stretch

[xPsi]

I did read the article but, as another user commented, their use of language is rather misleading. Contrast this with physicists at the LHC who will try to create and measure real black holes in the lab (although this is still an area of debate/discussion).

Another user in this thread has posted several interesting references which deserve some attention. It seems what they have created is a cavity made of light which is behaving analogously to a black _body_ (not hole) by effectively not permitting other light pulses to escape. Then this "cavity of light" is radiating with some effective temperature which has some superficial analogies with Hawking radiation. This is very interesting, especially since it is made of light, and there may be great utility, but as far as I can tell they are no more creating an "event horizon" than the interface of any other black body like the surface of pinhole on a closed box.

Re:black hole analogy is a stretch

[glitch23]

Correct link for the Kerr effect is here.

Re:black hole analogy is a stretch

[Anonymous Coward]

In fact, what they are talking about is an analogue model of gravity. You may recall from Einstein's general theory of relativity that "gravity is geometry". Essentially this means that light rays may bend if they propagate in a curved spacetime. Analogue models emulate curved spacetimes, without the requirement of a gravitional force. A simple example is sound waves in a river. If the river is flowing sufficiently fast (ie is faster than the speed of sound) then sound waves will not be able to propagate against the flow of the river and we create a spacetime horizon in analogy to Black holes. This "acoustic" black hole is actually due to the effective geometry our system has, rather than due to actual gravitational forces. Don't know if this helps...

It would blow

[Anonymous Coward]

It would blow Hawking Radiation

Re:It would blow

[viking099]

Man, some guys get all the lick^W luck

Re:It would blow

[Spy der Mann]

It would blow Hawking Radiation

Wow. That just blew my mind.

Re:It would blow

[45mm]

According to Hawking anyway ... that's what they're trying to prove with this experiment.

Re:It would blow

[Adambomb]

Or Unruh radiation.

Course this whole article is a study in "Physics is like sex, sure it has practical applications but thats not why we do it!" =D

Re:It would blow

[Marcos Eliziario]

So, they have two hypothesis to be tested:

1) That they can create a black hole
2) That such ridiculous small black holes would evaporate before fucking my day.

Motherfuckers! What's wrong with just simulating that with a badass supercomputer? Making experiments is so XX century....

Re:It would blow

[Anonymous Coward]

This is your mother speaking. I've told you a hundred times. STOP playing suck and blow with the goddamn laser gadgetry. People think you're strange enough as it is.

Please enough already...

[mahlerfan999]

Please, New Scientist is not a credible source for news on physical science. I wish people would stop posting New Scientist articles. If you want to find out what's hot in physics the Physical Review Focus is a great accessible source of real science stories that are important, and unlike the PRL they are free to read. http://focus.aps.org/

Re:Please enough already...

[hoppo]

Good point. To further raise the BS meter, there are always three words that lead me to believe a story is more science fiction than science: "British researchers discovered."

In the past several years, we've seen the following breakthroughs from British scientists:

Claims of teleportation.
Claims of sending a photon of light backwards in time.
Cancer treatment breakthroughs.

All have turned out to be nonsense. "British researchers" immediately says to me "STOP READING NOW."

No offense to the British intended, of course.

Re:Please enough already...

[wattrlz]

Weren't, [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steorn]the perpetual motion guys[/url] mostly british too?

Re:Please enough already...

[zymano]

I totally agree. This hurts NS's credibility.

Re:Please enough already...

[Kyojin]

Yeah well, I heard that a New Zealand so-called "scientist" managed to split an atom! That's impossible, what would it split in to?

Furthermore, the Germans claim to be able to see through people with what they call an X-Ray machine. Preposterous! Even the name sounds like bad science! I mean who would call it an "X-Ray" machine?

Ok, jokes aside, the New Scientist has never deliberately claimed more than is possible, although like any paper for the masses, the headlines are somewhat glorified and exaggerated.

Re:Please enough already...

[severoon]

After a cursory glance thru TFA, it sounds like light waves are just interfering in a way that prevents the lagging, faster wave from propagating past the slower, leading wave. Can any physics people out there explain how this could possibly be interpreted as "we created a black hole in a lab environment"?

Re:Please enough already...

[mrxak]

Yeah... it sounds more like they created a little event horizon for light. There's no gravity involved whatsoever, so it's not a black hole.

Re:Please enough already...

[Anonymous Coward]

As a physicist, I would just like to add emphasis to the message above. Please try to find an article somewhere else other than New Scientist. And if you can only find the article there then please do not use it.

Re:Please enough already...

[doctorfaustus]

Can you suggest any other more credible sources for physics news, preferably ones that publish new material on a daily basis?

Re:Please enough already...

[leenks]

Dude, the US created Scientology. Nuff said I think...

Re:Please enough already...

[zevans]

Fair point, when you put it like that... ...but at least we aren't breeding creationists.

Re:Please enough already...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, you are. Babies have to be encouraged to ignore their inborn knowledge. The world system does this rather well.

Oblig...

[Cervantes]

"I call it a Hawking Hole".

hmmmm

[Colin Smith]

Isn't this simply a case of someone not understanding the real meaning of the words "is kind of like"?

Re:hmmmm

[mattxb]

Not if they're claiming "is kind of like" means "isomorphic" .

Re:I don't get sending a "slow" and then "fast" wa

[spidercoz]

Properties of the medium. C is only in a vacuum, light has variable speeds all the way down to stop depending on what it's traveling through.

Funny?

[SeePage87]

Interesting, or insightful, maybe. But funny? You guys must have either very subtle or very bad senses of humor.

Re:I don't get sending a "slow" and then "fast" wa

[cromar]

c (~3×10^8 m/s) is the maximum speed of light in a vacuum. See the wiki article for good references about slowing light. And of course there's also relativity to consider, but that doesn't really have anything to do with this experiment (same frame of reference for observed and observer).

Re:I don't get sending a "slow" and then "fast" wa

[PieSquared]

It travels at "c" in a vacuum. Through various materials it travels slower. That's why lenses work - light travels slower in glass then in air. There are several ways to slow light down, but no way to speed it up to above "c."

IANAP but...

[Anonymous Coward]

How does this apply to gravitational effects on light in any way? Gravity is preventing light from escaping not "slower" wavelengths of light blocking "faster" wavelengths of light from being able to escape. Not to mention that the difference in the speed of light of various wavelengths in the fiber doesn't directly relate to the speed of light in a vacuum (which doesn't change no matter the wavelength of light). The experiment does not match the model. I'm curious of the phases relative to the different pulses. Is interference between the two pulses causing the "clog in the tubes"? I think the experiments should be conducted using a variety of phase shifts between the two pulses as well as various polarities (polarizing filters, etc.) of the light pulses (unless I'm misunderstanding the inherent structure of a light pulse). This article seems to be lacking in more in depth descriptions of exactly what they did.

rindler horizon

[F�an�ro]

This reminds me of a rindler horizon

A phenomen that has some similarities with a black hole, but without gravitational effects involved.

Re:rindler horizon

[orclevegam]

This reminds me of a rindler horizon

A phenomen that has some similarities with a black hole, but without gravitational effects involved. Now THAT is some useful information. Should change the title of this article to 'Laser Light Re-Creates "Rindler Horizon" in the Lab'.

How the universe works

[spun]

God made the universe 6,000 years ago. If you do not worship him and subjugate yourself to his will, he will torture you forever. He just put in things like dinosaur bones and black holes to mess with your head, to get you to disbelieve in him, so that he can torture you forever without feeling guilty about it.

He's kinda messed up because he was alone for like, eternity, until he made up some friends in his head, but he's incapable of imagining anything that is actually his peer, so he secretly hates us all for not providing the companionship he needs. That is how the universe works.

Re:How the universe works

[Anonymous Coward]

Talk about Modern Psychology meeting Religious Fundamentalism. I bet you could write a Doctoral Thesis on it.

Re:How the universe works

[garcia]

Just want to let you know that I had to get a new keyboard from an unused workstation because the one I had was ruined when water came spraying out of my nose and mouth after reading that post.

Thanks for making my day.

Re:How the universe works

[zevans]

'...believe differently...' and '...facts straight...'

Anyone else see the problem here?

And nope, you won't see people ridiculing the Islamic creation myths, because that's not how the Koran works. Since many scholars believe it embraces evolution and the Big Bang, there's nothing to laugh at (although I bet Fred Hoyle is pissed off)

  Try a quick Google for Islam and creation myth and you'll see what I mean.

Re:How the universe works

[Anonymous Coward]

Please return to the AOL message boards.

Re:How the universe works

[Anonymous Coward]

yes i approve this version ...you have the divine wisdom ... in case you all don't get it I am The God this creature is referring to and just to prove it ill... do something really horrible tomorrow somewhere, you can bet on it--ill really displease some random fæck. I kid you not ---- This is as sure as CNN.

Re:How the universe works

[deblau]

A cosmic Jewish Zombie who was his own father can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master. He will do it by removing an evil force from your soul that is there because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree.

That's how the universe works.

Re:How the universe works

[spun]

Dude, you and the Muslims worship the same God. I'm making fun of them at the same time. And when God made Satan, God knew exactly what he was doing.

Re:How the universe works

[glitch23]

Dude, you and the Muslims worship the same God. I'm making fun of them at the same time. And when God made Satan, God knew exactly what he was doing.

Dude, my God doesn't say it is okay to kill people for your own benefit and that by doing so you'll get 72 virgins when you die. Suicide is also a sin based on what my God teaches. Also, God didn't make Satan. Satan is a fallen angel and chose that tract. God just placed him in a certain location away from Heaven because of the choices which were made.

Re:How the universe works

[glitch23]

And nope, you won't see people ridiculing the Islamic creation myths, because that's not how the Koran works. Since many scholars believe it embraces evolution and the Big Bang, there's nothing to laugh at (although I bet Fred Hoyle is pissed off)

There are still plenty of other religions which share a Creation history (not myth) but I don't see anyone ridiculing them because of what they believe. However with that said, whether you care to characterize it as such or not, the Big Bang is a moment of Creation because were it not for that explosion we wouldn't be here right now. I'm sure Fred Hoyle is pissed considering he preferred the steady-state model but personal biases (his conviction that a steady-state model avoided a point of Creation) take time to be proven wrong.

Re:How the universe works

[zevans]

So,are you saying that every time someone on here cracks a Creationist gag we need to reply with several posts, each of an anti-Islam, anti-Judaism, anti-Sikh, anti-Buddhist, anti-Shinto, anti-a-dozen-other religions, just to ensure balance?

There's a whole entertainment industry based on picking holes in Jewish culture, for instance, so I'm not sure why you feel picked on.

The Big Bang was not a big bang or an explosion, as such, it's a very bad name for a very compelling theory. But then it was Hoyle that coined it...

Re:How the universe works

[spun]

How many wrong statements can one person make in one paragraph? First, yes, your God does say it is okay to kill people for your own benefit. Look at the old testament. How many people did God specifically tell his followers to kill? God made all the angels, and, here's the thing. Angels have no free will, only people do. Look it up. So, how did Satan choose to disobey? Again, look at Satan's role in the old testament. Look what God had him do to Job.

You don't even know your own religion, how pathetic is that?

Re:How the universe works

[ak3ldama]

First, yes, your God does say it is okay to kill people for your own benefit. Apparently the usage of the words Kill and Murder have been blurred since I see people using the word kill so often. The God of the Old Testament forbids "murder." Who in their right mind would choose to be so misled as to think that killing is never acceptable? Then again he says Dude, my God doesn't say it is okay to kill people for your own benefit and that by doing so you'll get 72 virgins when you die. which is not as vague as what you were talking about.

whatcouldpossiblygowrong

[khallow]

To answer this, let us keep in mind what's going on. Some guy is sending laser pulses down a fiber optic cable. One possible outcome is the end of all life and existence as we know it. Or we could develope a photonic form of life that enslaves us all. Light pulses in a piece of glass could be inherently potentially crazily dangerous and it's good that some slashbot is minding the store and protecting us from maybe the end of everything. One might be insane to let anyone do such a thing, at least without considering the possibility of extraordinary cosmological danger.

Re:whatcouldpossiblygowrong

[Anonymous Coward]

One might be insane to let anyone do such a thing, at least without considering the possibility of extraordinary cosmological danger.
I am a member here, but am posting this as an anon, for obvious reasons. I was surprised to see this story on/., mostly because this research has been done in my lab (the very room) I work in every day of the week - I work on totally different things, these guys were visitors in our lab using one of our lasers.

Truth be told it isn't quite like the submitter describes. As far as I remember (we had a department colloquia on it just before Christmas, and the work has stopped now) it is an analogy to a BH, not a BH itself.

At least I hope that to be the case given I work about three feet away from the setup they were using!

Speaking of lasers...

[ulzeraj]

cant wait until they implement this on sharks

Re:I don't get sending a "slow" and then "fast" wa

[Gat0r30y]

Many optical fibers such as the one they are using have nonlinearities. Light of one frequency does not travel at the same speed as light of another frequency. They are exploiting this nonlinearity.

HEAT!

[arizwebfoot]

Someone may have already asked this, but what about the heat generated as the wave approaches C?

Re:HEAT!

[orclevegam]

Someone may have already asked this, but what about the heat generated as the wave approaches C? These waves wouldn't approach C. C is the speed of light in a vacuum, not in a fiber optic cable. In fact this experiment wouldn't work in a vacuum because it relies on the second wave traveling faster than the first wave.

Re:HEAT!

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the speed of light is not always 186,000 miles/sec or 3*10^8 m/s (if your into that whole metric thing). The speed of light is actually a function of the permittivity and permeability of the medium through which it is traveling. The speed referenced that everyone knows is the speed through "free space" aka a vacuum.

The equation for the actual speed of light (in a vacuum) that relates these two properties is as follows:

c = 1 / sqrt (epsilon naught * mu naught)= 186,000 miles/sec or 3*10^8 m/s.

In a medium this would actually be c = 1 / sqrt (E*Eo * U * Uo) where E and U are the permittivity and permeability of the medium and Eo and Uo are the permittivity and permeability of free space. U and E can be anything between 0 and 1 (by definition). So as you can see, the speed of light can be much slower than just plane old 3*10^8 m/s.

Re:*yawn*

[sm62704]

OK, these aren't the pictures you are looking for. Move along. Here is the black hole on Mars, here is the vortex on Saturn.

Both are as much "black hole" as the one they "reated in the lab". Meanwhile, the last one I met was named JoAnne.

Speed of Light

[MacGyver2210]

I'm confused at how there can even be two different speeds of laser light pulse. Isn't the speed of light a constant? I would love to know how they have different speeds of laser pulses in the first place to test this out.

Re:Speed of Light

[orclevegam]

Only constant in a vacuum. Inside of a medium it varies by the wavelength of the light.

Professor Hawking

[JStegmaier]

I will call it a Hawking Hole.

Interesting test conditions...

[darkvizier]

FTA:

It should also be possible to use the artificial event horizon to help test whether anything can escape from a black hole. In the 1970s, Stephen Hawking predicted that hot black holes could radiate particles, dubbed Hawking radiation, but it's tough to check this using telescopes, because they'd be swamped by noise. The team calculates that their laser black hole shares this property, and that it will "radiate" photons if it heats up to about 1000 degrees centigrade.

This makes me wonder how they're differentiating between light produced by their optics cable being on fire, and falloff from the laser. Or do optic cables not ignite at 1000 degrees centigrade? Regardless, it seems that there would be conflicting noise in a (presumably) non-vaccuum, lighted environment.

There trolls, corrected that for ya

[TBerben]

Black holes suxorz _0_ \''\ '=o=' .|!| .| |

Re:There trolls, corrected that for ya

[Creepy Crawler]

Not if Hawking was right.

Then it will be "bl0wz3rs".

Editors fix the title please

[pembo13]

Since it doesn't seem to reflect that facts of the situation.

Obligatory...

[BUL2294]

Did the lab collapse into oblivion or is it impossible to see???

Eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

So they kind of, almost, sort of, but not quite and not really produced an effect kind of, almost, sort of, but not quite naturally theorized to occur in black holes? And they want to use this to positively, certainly, and definitely test theories and predictions about black holes themselves? Was their grant money in jeopardy or something?

But?

[Flere Imsaho]

How the hell to you send a slow pulse of light, so a faster one can catch up to it? I just don't C how.

Unexpected results.

[fahrbot-bot]

Unfortunately, when they tried recreating the Event Horizon, all they heard was "Liberate tutemet ex infernis".

Calcium carbonate crystals

[Kupfernigk]

You can do something like this without a laser using calcium carbonate (calcite) crystals. In these, the speed of light varies according to the angle of polarisation (I kid you not) so that when you look through the crystal you see things double (the refractive index, of course, depends on the speed of light in the medium versus that in air. The different speed rays are called the ordinary and the extraordinary ray.)

It was learning about this at Cambridge that made me decide that crystallographers had to be much cleverer than I was ever going to be, so I decided to do something easier instead. Many years later I got promoted because we encountered an engineering problem nobody else in the company could solve. I did not know the answer, but I retained enough knowledge to know that I needed a metallurgist with a specific area of expertise, found one and got the problem fixed. Learning apparently irrelevant stuff may one day be a job saver.

the laser's disappeared

[Anonymous Coward]

only to come back from HELL! YES! you don't need eyes were we're going!

RRARAHRARRARRARRIAIR

Explaining the article to those who haven't RTFTB

[Anonymous Coward]

(Read The Fine TextBook).

First off, the title of the fine article is mis-worded.

All frequencies of light do not travel through a fiber-optic cable at the same speed, nor do all frequencies scatter inside the cable at the same rate. (IIRC this is the concept of propogation index, which is directly related to the frequency dependent refractive index.)

Most fibers are designed around a "sweet spot" of a particular frequency by doping them with carefully controlled amounts of impurities during the deposition process. This sweet spot is usually down in either the low "visible" red or high infra-red (can't remember the nm numbers)

Essentially, these scientists have found a way to emulate a real-world phenomenon by using the photonic behavior inside the fiber where you send two different laser pulses down a fiber optic cable and the first pulse interferes with the ability of the second pulse to propogate down the fiber. This is due to the refractive index and propogation index of the fiber being modified by the energy contained in the first pulse, most likely due to thermal effects of heating the fiber (out of spec use) by an beyond normal power laser pulse. It's not really a black hole on a lab bench, more of a lab-bench black hole emulator with no gravitational lensing involved.

Hope this helps.

Hey I created a "Black Hole too"!

[timias1]

It is called a shoebox, and with the lid closed no light can escape. Why is this news?

Galactic Darwin Award

[Tablizer]

The Annual Galactic Darwin Award goes to a now non-existent small blue planet near the Orion arm of the Milky Way. The funny pink creatures there thought nothing of creating black holes in their ad-hoc little labs. Now they will think nothing, period. (Copyright Galactic United Press)

Hawking radiation???

[cephus440]

It wasn't long ago that Hawking believed that NOTHING escaped from a black hole. He even had a bet as to this and lost!
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6193-hawking-concedes-black-hole-bet.html
It should be called Preskill radiation!

Re:Nope

[Anonymous Coward]

"microscopic black holes we'll likely be generating at the Large Hadron Collider will cease to exist before they've even had sufficient time to absorb a neutrino"

Not according to Murphy's law.

Re:I don't get sending a "slow" and then "fast" wa

[NotZed]

Hmm, so they have a non-linear medium which transmits em waves at different speeds.

The send it two waves at different frequencies, which mix - which presumably produces a beat frequency.

The combined wave travels at the same speed ... (i couldn't be bothered rtfa, but this is the impression i get from the comments)

This is somehow an event horizon?

Sounds more like some funky wave-matter interaction to my untrained ears (just like having a medium with non-linear transmission properties does). Or even something simpler to do with the beat frequency. Probably has all sorts of useful applications, but it really doesn't sound like studying black holes is one of them.

Brin's Earth is good -- except the end

[DragonHawk]

"I still maintain that Earth by David Brin is one of the best science fiction novels I have ever read."
Except for ending. Brin must have been smoking some pretty good stuff to come up with that. O_o

Hawking Radiation Conversion

[pugugly]

Serious question for anyone that has the math to answer it-

As I understand it, as the black hole loses mass, the tidal 'well' grows steeper, and in turn the hawking radiation grows more pronounced and powerful.

Doesn't this make, in some sense, an ultimate matter --> energy converter?

If a black hole of size X has a 'temperature' equivalent to the conversion of 1 gram of matter per second, and you force into the event horizon 1 gram of energy per second, you have effectively done a complete conversion of 1 gram of matter to 89,875,517,873,681.764 joules of energy - feed (counter intuitively) more matter into the black hole to lower the output, choke it to raise the output.

Disregarding the fact that creating and maintaining a blackhole itself would require superscience, it seems to me that this violates entropy in some fashion, yet I don't see any particular theoretical reason it should be all that difficult, given the specified level of superscience in the first place. One can easily imagine a star around a black hole where the stellar byproducts of the stars fusion are fed into the black hole, the energy from the Black hole is converted into simple hydrogen, the fusion process creates helium, rinse, repeat. Surround the whole thing with a Dyson Sphere to capture the solar wind and feed it back, and you have a cozy, quiet winter cottage away from those annoying lesser races.

Surely there's a way of proving this is or isn't theoretically feasible?

Pug

Re:Hawking Radiation Conversion

[tqft]

"Doesn't this make, in some sense, an ultimate matter --> energy converter"
yes - but the release process can take a long time

"it seems to me that this violates entropy in some fashion,"
No it doesn't
the hawking radiation is effectively (expected to be) white noise, the input matter is organised - entropy has increased

"Disregarding the fact that creating and maintaining a blackhole itself would require superscience"
Maintaining a blackhole is easy - feed it matter at approximately the rate it is radiating (the e-mc2 thing) and it will be good for longer than any race may want to live, even without the input. Correct creating a non-trivial blackhole requires manipulating at least stellar quantities of matter - the smaller they are the faster they (are expected to) evaporate.

" hole, the energy from the Black hole is converted into simple hydrogen"
Doing this without significant losses requires the superscience you mention

Re:Hawking Radiation Conversion

[pugugly]

"Doesn't this make, in some sense, an ultimate matter --> energy converter"
yes - but the release process can take a long time; If a given radiation output (say, 434,424,150,177 joules per second, the U.S. electrical use per Wikipedia) is balanced by a given input ((E in joules/sec) / (c^2)= 4.8 Kg mass converted per seconds) then it's really not a time issue - the energy is generated by the tidal forces of the black hole - it goes up as the hole gets smaller, down as it gets larger. So there's a degree of latency is adjusting it, but there's no time delay in the conversion process - you're just keeping the tidal forces from going out of control. Just don't run out of garbage to through down the hole - .

"it seems to me that this violates entropy in some fashion,"
No it doesn't
the hawking radiation is effectively (expected to be) white noise, the input matter is organised - entropy has increased. not really - the hawking radiation is also 'useful energy', by definition of low entropy. Indeed, every photon of background radiation that's absorbed at temperature X (wat, like , and then re-emitted at a temperature above that means a lowering of entropy doesn't it? As long as the hawking radiation is above the temperature of the background radiation of the universe, then the black hole is anti-entropic isn't it? And since the expansion of the universe in turn guarantees that, eventually, any given black how will have a higher black-body temperature than the background radiation of the universe,eventually they will always be anti-entropic - releasing more energy than they take in. Smaller black holes are just further along in the process to start with.

"Disregarding the fact that creating and maintaining a blackhole itself would require superscience"
Maintaining a blackhole is easy - feed it matter at approximately the rate it is radiating (the e-mc2 thing) and it will be good for longer than any race may want to live, even without the input. Correct creating a non-trivial blackhole requires manipulating at least stellar quantities of matter - the smaller they are the faster they (are expected to) evaporate.

" hole, the energy from the Black hole is converted into simple hydrogen"
Doing this without significant losses requires the superscience you mention Yeah - that's fun SF speculation. But the fundamentals don't seem to be particularly a problem - black holes still seems to me to be anti-entropic.

Pug

Re:Hawking Radiation Conversion

[tqft]

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/BlackHoles/hawking.html
"Hawking predicted it should glow like a blackbody of temperature

                                          6 × 10-8/M kelvins,

so only for very small black holes would this radiation be significant. Still, the effect is theoretically very interesting, and folks" ...
" However, the total lifetime of a black hole of M solar masses works out to be

                                          10^71 M3 seconds

so don't wait around for a big one to give up the ghost."

Mmm some actual research as opposed to crapping from memory
http://casa.colorado.edu/~ajsh/hawk.html
"Hawking radiation has a blackbody (Planck) spectrum with a temperature T given by

kT = hbar g / (2 pi c) = hbar c / (4 pi rs) "

looks like some formatting has been lost

"- the hawking radiation is also 'useful energy', by definition of low entropy."
if that statement is true you might be more right than me but the "by definition" looks dodgy

It's not a black hole.

[Lewrker]

It's Intelligent Sucking at its best.

bh analogy not as big a stretch as you might think

[ErkDemon]

The experiment is cool, but as far as I can tell, this is nothing like a black hole in the cosmological sense. Simply reproducing one superficial property of black hole ("light cannot escape") does not make it a gravitational singularity with an event horizon and its associated properties.

The press release's title was a bit exaggerated (they aren't actually creating a GR1915 black hole), but the press release's explanatory introduction was reasonable "a team ... claims to have simulated a black hole's event horizon in the lab".

For example, I seriously doubt electron-positron conversions in their light cavity would behave at all like said conversions at a real event horizon since the charged particles would be subject to very different kinds of forces from those near a real black hole.

Actually, the situation seems to be analogous.

Also, Hawking radiation is related to black hole evaporation.

Yep

This would not occur with the lasers in an analogous way because the mechanics of this light bubble "evaporation" is totally different.

Nope.
The analogies work pretty well across a situations in range of different subjects. For instance, the idea of Hawking radiation seems ot have been partly inspired by the slightly earlier idea that a spinning charged metal sphere should throw off radiation, and so (by analogy) a Kerr (rotating) black hole ought to radiate too (even though the hole's relevant "charge" was gravitational rather than electric). From the rotational case we could then deduce that even a non-rotating gravitational black hole ought to radiate.

While the "obvious" mechanics may be different, the statistical mechanics (and the usefulness of QM-style arguments to model the situations) can have striking similarities. For instance, we might expect the acoustic analogue of Hawking radiation to occur across a supersonic jet's shockwave, and we can try modelling this as the result of an apparent "phonon" pair-production process.

It sounds to me like a case of one subfield (photonics) sexing up their lingo by adopting the lingo of another subfield (general relativity) to get press. IAAP, but not a cosmologists/GR expert, so I'm willing to stand corrected.

It's probably valid research. The quantum gravity guys have spent the last few years trying to persuade physicists to work towards experiments that can study optical horizons in the lab, to try to get a result that might hopefully show analogous Hawking radiation effects for real (in a non-gravitational context).

Once we're more familiar with these non-gravitational versions of the effect, we'll be more confident that our efforts to try to write a theory of quantum gravity that includes them is modelling them in the right way.

The relevant review paper on the counterparts of Hawking radiation in non-gravitational contexts is
"Analogue Gravity" Barcelo, Liberati & Visser. http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/gr-qc/0505065
Scan through the references section at the end and you'll get a feel for the wide range of analogous situations that are being studied, form non-linear optics to signal propagation in Bose-Einstein condensates.

If you're new to the subject, you might want to first limber up with the Wikipedia page on acoustic metrics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_metric

Non-gravitational Hawking radiation

[ErkDemon]

While I know nothing about Hawking radiation, it seems like gravity must be somehow involved, and this experiment is all about electromagnetic forces.

AFAIK, William Unruh seems to have been the first person to point out the apparent statistical similarity of the results of Hawking radiation through a gravitational event horizon to those of more conventional conventional indirect radiation through an acoustic horizon.

W.G. Unruh, "Experimental black hole evaporation" Phys. Rev. Lett. 46 (1981), 1351-1353

Since GR1915 doesn't support "indirect radiation" effects, the similarity tends to be presented as something that can be used as an efficient analogy or toy model for the QM effect acting across a gravitational horizon, rather than as a literal description.

But since the real gravitational situation isn't exactly testable, theoretical physicists studying Hawking radiation will be very glad for a verification of any version of the effect. Otherwise, they're trying to base their initial arguments for a theory of quantum gravity on the assumed reality of effects that haven't yet been demonstrated to be real.

The "popular" account of Hawking radiation.

[ErkDemon]

I think a QM guy would usually tend to say that the escaping and infalling particles both have positive energy, but that there's also a two-particle energy deficit created in the region when the pair is produced. You might normally expect the two particles to immediately mutually annihilate again to pay back the deficit, but the difference in gravitational attraction at their two locations ("tidal forces") wrenches them apart so that this doesn't happen. So the hole's region loses two particlesworth of massenergy, and the infalling particle pays one back. Bottom line, one particle leaves the hole's region, the hole's region loses one particlesworth of massenergy, and the hole's horizon has to shrink to fit.

This isn't the only way of visualising Hawking radiation, but its probably the most popular one. One can also construct arguments to do with the infalling particle carrying negative information, but those are likely to be more controversial.

Re:bh analogy not as big a stretch as you might th

[xPsi]

Very cool. Thanks for the response.

Everybody is an expert!

[breusin]

Everybody is an expert!

unruh effect

[Khashishi]

According to Einstein's equivalence principle, the local physics of a constant accelerating frame of reference is the same as the physics of a uniform gravitational field. This equivalence is so powerful that if you accelerate for long enough, the physics are like if you were stationary in space near a black hole. You expend fuel to accelerate in empty space, just like you expend fuel to stay stationary near a black hole. Moreover, you actually can see a black hole behind you in an accelerating reference frame, and it even exudes Hawking radiation. This latter effect is explained by the Unruh effect. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unruh_effect

Agree: enough already...of you

[pablochacin]

I wish people would stop posting comments about New Scientist not been a credible source of news. WE ALREADY KNOW THAT. And, even if you don't believe this, WE CAN DISCERN, WITHOUT YOUR HELP, about the credibility of the ULTIMATE source New Scientist is citing. Haven't you notice that some news refers to articles in credible sources?

New Scientist Dreck

[daymitch]

New Scientist is also a good source for inaccurate information in the life sciences, too. IF you are in the market for misrepresented results and wild speculation about the implications of a biological finding, you can count on New Scientist to deliver. Bleh.

hmm

[woolio]

Moreover, you actually can see a black hole behind you in an accelerating reference frame, and it even exudes Hawking radiation. This latter effect is explained by the Unruh effect.

This sounds like a scene from Jurassic Park.

Your in a spaceship, looking in the rear-view-mirror. You see the black hole behind you.. Then you exclaim, "Uh... Ruh--Ruh---Run for your livveeess!!!!!!"

Hmm

[woolio]

To be big enough to suck the earth in from the inside, they'd need a pretty powerful gravitational field - anything lab produced would just disapate as it starves to death (earthly material is not dense enough to grow it substantially).

Someone might find a way around that eventually. [A similar argument might have been made at one time for what we now call the 'Atomic Bomb'].

Let's just hope they don't..