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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.'"
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.
......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.
All theory is gray