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Stephen Hawking: 'There Are No Black Holes'
ananyo writes "Stephen Hawking has proposed a new solution to the black-hole firewall paradox, which has been vexing physicists for almost two years. The paradox troubles physicists because if the firewall scenario is correct, Einstein's general theory of relativity is flouted. But the classical theory black hole cannot be reconciled to the quantum mechanical prediction that energy and information can escape from a black hole. Now Hawking has proposed a tantalizingly simple solution to the paradox which allows both quantum mechanics and general relativity to remain intact — black holes simply do not have an event horizon to catch fire. The key to his claim is that quantum effects around the black hole cause spacetime to fluctuate too wildly for a sharp boundary surface to exist. As Hawking writes in his paper, 'The absence of event horizons mean that there are no black holes — in the sense of regimes from which light can't escape to infinity.'"
Hawking: ...this means, in a sense, that there are no black holes. Only what I call "Hawking surfaces".
Layman: Does this mean it's possible to travel faster than the speed of light?
Hawking: Sure, why not.
Do not try to reconcile the event horizon. That's impossible. Instead only try to realize the truth. There is no black hole.
Does that mean that he gets his $100 back he lost to John Preskill?
The information is quite useful for research.
That's it, science has failed once again. I'm going back to christianity.
lol
Look dumshit !! There are black holes and you are wrong jello brain !!
Oh, sure, easy for you to blather about Mr. Smarter-Than-Einstein AC.
Put up your research, with a name, or shut up.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
Does it exist or not?
The event horizon oscillates faster than the speed of light over a greater distance than quantum tunneling can occur. Inbound light would follow the wavefront in, only to become trapped as the next wave built outside its escape range.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
My sense, in reading a considerable number of articles about astrophysics, etc, is that we are in a period which is awaiting the next big breakthrough in knowledge, along the lines of what Newton and Einstein produced. There are still too many unknowns and ambiguities that need to be resolved by discovering a piece of the puzzle which we don't even know exists yet, and I think people are still trying to get their heads wrapped about quantum physics. That said, I'm not a physicist, just an interested lay person, so I may be wrong in that summation, but it seems many of the discussions occurring these days at least pay a backhanded nod to that sort of notion.
In this picture, there would still be astrophysical black holes in every meaningful sense of the word, i.e. condensed objects from which light would not escape. Such objects would have an "apparent horizon", which can be defined locally by the property that all lightlike geodesics are ingoing.
What these black-hole-like objects would not have is an Event Horizon, which is a global property of the spacetime, and is only defined by the behavior at asymptotic infinity. It's a neat resolution of the whole mess: way more sensible than firewalls.
But it's still just hand-waving -- note that the entire argument relies on AdS/CFT, which assumes the black holes are embedded in de Sitter space, which has a negative cosmological constant and is most definitely not the kind of spacetime we live in. And AdS/CFT is itself an unproven conjecture, although it is supported by many specific example cases. Until somebody comes up with a theory of quantum gravity, this stuff is all guesswork. Caveat emptor.
Seriously? Or just a snarky way to show your ignorance?
The actual paper can be found here: http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.5761. People have suggested informally ideas somewhat similar to this one before, but Hawking proposal seems to actually have the math behind it. Possibly most importantly, he can show that his predictions are a consequence of gauge/gravity duality http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdS/CFT_correspondence. This suggests that this may be a testale consequence of certain string theories if one could observe a black hole under the right conditions and see that it only was pretending to be a black hole.
You know, he's the guy who makes all those routers, AP's, repeaters and such.
It's all Greek to me.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
The family is saying something about as gently as possible about Steven Hawking. They say this at the same time of the celebrity news.
Now my head is going to hurt all day.
Why do I bother trying to read this stuff in the morning.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
That was a clever solution. I suggest we apply it to other problems too: Whoops, and there is no cancer. Pop - no more hunger in the world. Zip, and all the pollution is gone.
It means all these business idiots will stop saying "event horizon".
Proverbs 21:19
Or at least some sort of mathematical proof :)
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
You claim
but later you write
You are contradicting yourself.
Either relativity is far from even remotely correct, then it has no use at all.
Or it has as much use as Newtonian gravity does (which is quite a lot), then it is certainly not "far from even remotely correct".
Data from the satellite orbiting Uranus confirms that the hole is, in fact, brown-ish
That is an elegant solution that is far more consistent than the "absolute" limits so loved by many. It also points out that our understanding of Quantum Mechanics in reality (as opposed to theory) is pretty incomplete and fuzzy.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Personally, now that the firewall is down - I am more worried about all kinds of cyber attacks!
Newtonian Gravity isn't correct either, we still use it in limited scope.
It doesn't mean that Relativity is prevented from the same usage.
But it is still far from correct and the day people finally accept that and move on, maybe some actual research will get done.
Dark Matter and Dark Energy are literal blackholes of knowledge that rips Relativity apart in every sense of the metaphor.
There is hardly a contradiction, just you putting meaning where there is none.
This ranks up there with "Einstein: 'The speed of light is actually infinite'", "Newton: 'Gravity doesn't exist'", or "Copernicus: 'Actually the sun does go around the Earth'."
Wow.
...because he calls them Hawking Holes!
It is better to be the hammer than the anvil.
And look in the mirror. I bet you see a black hole. Now where's my Nobel prize?
Put up some research?
How about you look in to the systems I mentioned and see the bullshit they have to deal with despite using supposedly "perfect" equations.
Relativity has never worked. It is just another step up from Netwonian physics that predicts things WELL ENOUGH for most of the uses we care for.
If the equations worked, GPS would be fine.
If the equations worked, satellites wouldn't be spazzing out over long time periods.
If the equations worked, there'd be no need for dark matter or energy. OH WAIT.
Even Einstein said it himself that the cosmological constant was a mistake, despite it being a confirmed fact.
He even outright attacked quantum entanglement.
Einstein had many flaws, stop thinking he was perfect. It is 2014, move on already.
There isn't even a need for research when practical implementations of the equations are FAILING and have done since day1.
Relativity is one of the most spectacular successful failures of the last century. It taught us a great deal.
Sadly it seems there are even moronic fanboys in science.
I don't know why people hang on this guy's every word. He's a man, just like any other man and he makes mistakes just like any other man. If you put your faith in man from time to time you're going to feel a let down. Just sayin.
Lol. Internet hero giving his completely random opinion on relativity. How about some peer reviewed documentation? Even some simple equations would do. Please...point out the exact step in the equations that you think is wrong. Then we'll talk.
I've always wondered why there had to be a singularity at the centre of a black hole. Now, it seems, there might not be!
If Hawking is correct, there could even be no singularity at the core of the black hole. Instead, matter [...] never quite crunch down to the centre.
I've been trying to tell people this for years (no, not in a serious crackpot physicist way, just a vague pet idea). Should've tried it with a voice synthesizer...
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
So basically he's saying the boundary fluctuates so wildly, information behind it can suddenly end up outside it when the boundary jumps back. Of course whatever just ended up outside is now sitting next to a black hole, so the chances of escape are still very low (but non-zero).
If true, this is like saying Newtonian mechincs is wrong and broken now that we know about the relativistic effects, but the reality is difference is so minor we can still follow him for normal tasks.
Taking "there are not black holes" from this is just melodramatic. But then Hawking has been all about showmanship an ignored real science since about 1990. He should have been a reality-TV host instead of a physicist.
"I call it a Hawking Hole."
- Hawking in Futurama
Please look at this paper, as well as to the other papers published by prof. Loinger.
I agree that his rant is quite idiotic. Now I am no physicist by any means, but if there are any flaws in relativity wouldn't that mean possibly that it is just incomplete? I wouldn't think that it is necessarily wrong, it could be added onto. Just saying since I don't know much about it.
Newtonian Gravity isn't correct either, we still use it in limited scope. It doesn't mean that Relativity is prevented from the same usage.
But it is still far from correct and the day people finally accept that and move on, maybe some actual research will get done. Dark Matter and Dark Energy are literal blackholes of knowledge that rips Relativity apart in every sense of the metaphor.
There is hardly a contradiction, just you putting meaning where there is none.
You know that building you live in? Built with Newtonian mechanics. That's why it stays up.
And the sat-nav in your phone? That uses general relativity. If it didn't, it wouldn't be able to locate you in the right country, let alone on the right street.
Newtonian mechanics and general relativity have been proven correct many times over. What they are though is incomplete. And there's a mountain of research happening right now to work out why.
No colour or religion ever stopped the bullet from a gun
I always liked the term gravstar.
I imagine it to be something with uniform density throughout. Why? It would imply an upper threshold limit to gravity within the confines of space. ( Time is another matter, since we have yet to observe the end or death of a blackhole. No, I'm not implying it exists. ) Yes, this is likely counterintuitive, but then we aren't dealing with matter anymore. Only gravity.
Test case: If we observed 2 different 'blackholes' that had equivalent spatial diameter, but differing gravitational strength, it would negate that possibility. If gravity appears consistent throughout the Universe, something the former would also verify, and I think mathematically right now it does, then there should be no core because its density at any point within is equal to every other point. This is gravity being compressed to its limit. There's nothing else beyond this threshold. ( See no current evidence of 'blackhole' death. )
So what is it composed of? Gravitons! If you think of gravity as the 'garbage' left over from matter, and that the accompanying matter has been stripped away, then you are left with gravitational densities that don't disintegrate in the absense of matter.
So where does this lead us? Fluctuations at the edge, so say Hawking? Good. In theory, we should be able to observe those fluctuations against very close nearby matter, assuming we could measure with enough sensitivity. In fact, w
Where does gravstar fit in this? If the contents of 'blackholes' are only gravity, or gravitons, why not name it a gravstar?
Q had it right . . . .
When you don't like how the current theory is going . . . just change the gravitational constant of the universe . .
Seriously . . . there are few absolutes in Science . . . just models. And perhaps this (todays) model . . . is improved over yesterdays. He's at least willing to fling something down and see if it sticks . . . that's how progress is made.
No, I don't remember your name. But the memory mapped screen on a TRS80 from 1977 is from 15360 to 16383 if that helps.
He made a mistake on page two.
GR is still more accurate than Newtonian, but the accuracy difference for what we use it is not enough to be worth it. I'm pretty sure that all of our intra-solar system satellites still use Newtonian because they do not move fast enough for GR to become an issue.
How are eternity and second law of thermodynamics interrelated?...I think you are assuming that laws and principals observed here must apply everywhere. Here's a thought experiment: suppose I created a simulated world with my own laws applied to---am I subject to those laws as well?
He made a mistake on page two. Technically, he made an arithmetic mistake on page two.
That would make sense since there are infinities all over the place.
See the Simpsons' episode "They Saved Lisa's Brain"
Atheism. Do you know what it means? Lacking a belief in god or gods.
There are scientists who are of faith.
Indeed in the past, it was entirely a clergy-like following to do "Natural Philosophy". Many vicars and priests were scientists.
But the problem is that a lot of you fundie xtians have at least enough sense to know you have no grounds to attack rationality, therefore have to resort to accusations of your own irrationality onto others to attack that, or at the least, "reply" to your detractors "Well, you are too!".
- Black Hole
And that has any relevance why?
No colour or religion ever stopped the bullet from a gun
Wrong again.
If you don't take account of relativistic effects, satellites tend to deorbit over time, and also it throws off your GPS like nobody's business.
The speed they are moving at in geostationary orbit is enough to notice relativistic effects. So much so that your satnav wouldn't work without them being "corrected" by some GR mathematics.
Relativity is the most proven theory in the history of science. Nearly every physics major that's graduated in the past 80 years has proven out a different part of it in some new and unique way as part of their doctoral thesis. Every observation that's ever been made that seems to contradict it has later been found to be faulty or explained by some other phenomena that we hadn't understood as of yet.
Infinities exist everywhere in nature. They are naturally hard for us to understand because of our species engrained believe in the Birth/Death cycle and we feel it should apply to everything just well as it does to us.
Lastly, you are correct, Relativity will fail eventually. Even Einstein knew this. It explains "how" things work but only in limited condition and scales. Just like how Newtonian physics worked at the Macro level and at speeds and timescales humans could measure at the time it was devised, relativity only works at certain scales. But it does not invalidate the predictions of Newtonian physics, it just expands them. Eventually we will learn more and there will be a new theory that either explains it all, or at least improves on what Newtonian and Relativistic physics has shown us.
Science is not opposed to christianity.
However, the articles of faith that make up christianity, being complete works of fiction, do not withstand the dispassionate and rational scrutiny of science, and therefore the faith is opposed to science, in the same way as rats are opposed to rat poison.
FAITH may not be opposed to christianity, but that method of faith has to ditch almost all the recorded catchetisms of organised faiths to do so.
Hawking is opening the door to a scenario so extreme "that anything in principle can get out of a black hole"
What? And no one has mentioned the Heechee yet?
There used to be a time when I could read the comment section of a post like this and really learn something insightful. Used to...
You're pretty sure. Oh, that's settled then. Don't bother googling it or anything, it's not like anyone actullay knows this stuff or publishes anything about it.
FYI: Merely the altitude of, say, geostationary orbit implies a potential energy that means you have to account for time dilation if you want to stay in sync with clocks on the ground. This was proven experimentally decades ago, and predicted way before that.
sudo ergo sum
I don't think it is, no. But I do think he overstates his case somewhat. For me, the left eyebrow is raised by the need for huge quantities of "dark matter" in order to account for large scale structure of galaxies even though studies of our local region of space show no such matter exists (or is required to explain it). Now OK, if they discover some WIMPs in future I will hold my hands up, but right now being sceptical is the correct position to take on this. And if WIMPs don't exist, well, the predictions of GR won't match observation so at the very least it will need modification.
This is all notwithstanding the fact that physics simply describes the regularities of experience and apparently gives different answers to the same question depending on how that question is posed. It's still amusing to me that mathematics cannot even deal with the 3-body problem in Newtonian Mechanics adequately without resorting to perturbation methods. Then there's the regularisation issue in Quantum Theory, where infinities magically cancel each other out.
I am not a physicist, but I reiterate the need for scepticism everywhere and at all times. It's possible to be sceptical and also have "wow" moments when physicists come up with genuinely new ideas. I do sometimes wonder just how primitive our current bleeding edge ideas will look to our distant descendents.
You know what they say about opinions... The scientific community would love you long time if you had any solid foundation to base your strong opinion on.
The speed they are moving at in geostationary orbit is enough to notice relativistic effects. So much so that your satnav wouldn't work without them being "corrected" by some GR mathematics.
Your statements seem to imply that GPS satellites are in geostationary orbit. They are not. The system would not work if they were.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Dark matter is required to account for the structure of our galaxy. Sans dark matter, there is not enough observed mass by an order of magnitude in our galaxy to account for the observed galactic rotation curve.
"Unseen matter" is actually the softball bet their, as opposed to the idea that somehow - and nobody really knows or has ever seen how - gravity works differently over long distances. It's just the unseen matter has to have specific properties to fit with observation.
It's trivial to show General Relativity is wrong: It doesn't match observations. At the moment a hypothesis (WIMPs) are presented to explain the discrepancy. If WIMPs are not found by experiment, however, then the proposition becomes somewhat different, does it not? Right now GR and Newtonian Mechanics are correct insofar as they're useful for making predictions that turn out through observation to be true, to some degree of accuracy. With GR there's no need for the planet Vulcan to explain the peculiarities of the orbit of Mercury, for example. But is it true at the largest scales? The jury is still out.
First they tell me Pluto is no longer a planet but instead one of a huge number of KBOs.
Now Black Holes don't exist.
What's next, the coffee I'm drinking is actually tea? Oh wait... this was a Chai Latte.
NVM.
Asimov wrote that great letter - the relativity of wrong.
Any new theory has to account for why the old theory worked for the cases it did. General relativity simplifies at low speeds to Newtonian mechanics for example.
Or from the letter - the Earth is round, but assuming it's flat over short distances is perfectly valid (and we do it all the time - the idea of building level or flat floors for example).
To the best of my knowledge, WIMPS are postulated to exist due to some prediction of the current model of particle physics. I doubt if GR predicts WIMPS. Of course, I could be wrong and would welcome any corrections.
Maybe General Relativity and Quantam mechanics are wrong, not the existance of black holes.
In fact the image showing galaxies interconnected maybe be an inter-galaxy highway using black holes.
He seems to have forgotten the rule about theorems, if there is one case that falsafies a therom, it should be 1) discarded or 2) rethought.
How long, I wonder, shall we have to wait? There was rapid scientific progress in the 19th and 20th centuries, but when looking at the longer timescales, that is an aberration. For most of history technological progress was slow and rare, and the next millenium may just as likely to be similar to the 500-1500 period, when nothing much happened.
Relativity is the most proven theory in the history of science.
Well, I think that's a bit exaggerated: We're pretty clear about gravity, for example. But you're right it's on very solid ground by now.
I am officially gone from
Interesting troll. A bit heavy handed, though. If I were to grade it, if it was written by a high school student it would get a C+, if written by a college student, it would rate a D- (barely passing).
Point of interest: the Copenhagen convention suggests that there is no possibility of a physics Out There. That all physicists can do is make mental models of whatever reality might be, and play around with those models, since reality itself is unobservable without the distortions of observer bias. There are some things we think we know, and there are some things that we know that we can never know (such as what is happening in close proximity to a singularity, or why is Pi 3.14159... and not something else). And it turns out that because there are some things that we know we can never know, we can't be sure about any of the things we think we know.
So, yes, AC is completely correct: relativity is wrong. Also quantum mechanics is wrong. Also classical physics is wrong. It is all wrong. So what? Asking whether this stuff is right or wrong is asking the wrong question. The right questions to ask of any physics model are: How useful is it, and what is its scope of usefulness?
We are the tool using monkeys. We are not Gods. Don't sweat the Really Big Stuff. Do something with the tools: make more tools, make some fun toys and games. That's what we do best. And, that's all that we can do.
Will
Once physicists realized the speed of light was finite, you could conceive of density and radius that exceeded the speed of light. Einsteins special realtivity showed that Maxwells equations implied light speed as a maximal speed in the universe, so this radius then became a barrier.
GPS sats are not in geostationary, or even geosynchronous, orbits. They're in 12-hour orbits in several different inclinations so that the poles have coverage too.
re: Hawking's appreaences on The Simpsons
"Although Hawking has stated that he enjoyed guest-starring on The Simpsons, he has also mentioned that his cameos have made many people mistake him for a fictional character."
Gotta love the guy! Other people, not so much.
We just read an awesome article about science. Now let's start talking about religion!
> We're pretty clear about gravity, for example.
Hahaha. Not even close. The theory of gravity does not work for very small (electrons DO NOT fall into the nucleus) or very large (our galaxy doesn't work w/o a MASSIVE amount of "dark mass"). It's a much less well supported theory than, say, evolution.
Your statements seem to imply that GPS satellites are in geostationary orbit. They are not. The system would not work if they were.
Which is true, but a little quick google searching shows that relativistic effects do indeed need to be taken into account with GPS satellites (such as this link).
It spits out infinities all over the place.
Infinities don't exist in reality. They exist solely as concepts.
What infinities "all over the place"? Are you talking about singularities in black holes? Because that is one specific place, where mainstream physicists even think GR might be in accurate. But that is far from "horribly wrong." And what other places? Unless you are talking about the situations that come up if you make a bad coordinate choice, but even GR itself shows those are not real infinities. You can create infinities in any theory with a bad choice of coordinates, and can do it with just trying to describe things like position on a sphere.
Its uses right now don't even work right! They have to constantly resync GPS even WHILE USING it. It cannot predict anything beyond certain energies, masses or time scales.
Are you talking about drift of the orbit or drift of the timing? Do you have any citations that the error resulting in such corrections is significant above other known sources of errors like non-uniformity of Earth and other effects that have been demonstrated to alter satellite orbits at varying levels of subtleness?
For crying out loud, relativity misses out more than 70% of the universe that it tries to predict!
GR doesn't miss anything out there in that sense. Either observations are missing matter because it is in a form we can't see or somehow missed, or that matter is not out there. In the former case, it is not a shortcoming of GR, which doesn't care what type of stuff you plug into the field equations in terms of how easy it is to see or not. In the latter case, either it is a fault of GR, or even could just be a more complicated situation where GR is still correct, but there is some other than matter that contributes to energy, pressure and mass terms.
Einstein can't be wrong, right? He must have been god himself and not human!!
I think Einstein wouldn't argue other theories, part of being a scientist or physicist is not fully believing your own BS. And fully being open to other possibilities.
The fact that they brain wash students, educating them from a singular theory goes against everything.
Even Einstein said it himself that the cosmological constant was a mistake, despite it being a confirmed fact.
He said it was a mistake, because he added the term to suit his own thoughts of how the universe should be, not because of any actual evidence. It wasn't until years later that actual evidence suggest that the term be added back in.
It is a mistake to add something to a theory that is not motivated by data, even if it turns out that future data does properly motivate it. It is like a doctor saying it is a mistake to give a medicine to a patient that doesn't show any signs of needing that medicine, even if it turned out the patent actually did need it and was given the drug later after displaying symptoms.
Thou shalt define thy acronyms.
Stephen, you insensitive clod ! DAMTP Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics CPT Charge, Parity, and Time ADS Anti-De Sitter CFT Conformal Field Theory (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...)
There's a "Robinette Broadhead" joke in here somewhere, and I just can't make it come out. Where's Gelle-Klara when we need her?
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Two facts: 1: The Theory of Relativity states that the space time continuum warps near strong gravitational forces and this causes GPS clocks to run slightly faster than they would on earth. 2: Waffles are good.
Sorry but the navigation on your phone uses triangulation via cell phone towers. It's called A-GPS AKA fake GPS. That's why it works while you are indoors. Triangulation was developed in the early 1600s. The cell phone towers triangulate your position then extrapolate coordinates for you since the location of each tower has been calculated. A-GPS is less accurate but quicker because you don't have to talk to an actual GPS satellites.
The theory of relativity wasn't that hard to comprehend. If the speed of light is a constant, time isn't. The only other answer is that all math is fucked.
His other hole isn't much better.
Absolutely, the relativistic effect part is correct. I just wanted to correct the geostationary GPS satellite part because it is a very common assumption.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
I always hear about this galactic rotation curve. I understand that there are other observations that seem to point the way to there being extra matter also, but the curve idea give rise to a question I have. Have physicists taken into account that the stars nearer the center of the galaxy are in a deeper gravity well and so will experience time at a different rate than the stars out at the edge. Also, the stars at the edge are moving faster, so they have a speed factor to their local time. If time is changing as you move from the center to the edge, then I would not expect things to appear right to someone who calculates how things should look by some computer simulation if the simulated galaxy has consistent time throughout.
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
If you add the mass of the egos of those on slashdot, that solves the whole galaxy missing mass problem.
There was already a decade-old or more theory that a particle entering the black hole will enter at even the slightest angle. That causes the hole to change spin just slightly in one direction due to the energy and mass of the incoming particle. The spin of the black hole can theoretically be reverse engineered with math to determine what particle mass and velocity fell into the black hole. The only problem is opposing particles creating a net spin change in one direction or the other. Technically for any given spin level, there is a 1 dimensional parabolic line of potential "answers" which may be allowable for preservation of information.
Saying the event horizon isn't a static and symmetrical line doesn't help the fact that if you go a short distance deeper past the potential area where the event horizon could occur, light still can't escape.
There is a third theory that if a singularity gets enough energy in one direction from a jet of particles, it can spin faster than the speed of light due to having a radius that's large enough to exist yet infinitely small (I know, headache-inducing) and at that point it would stop emitting gravity then transport itself to another location or turn into dark matter or break apart or inflate to a neutron star or turn into pure energy or shift into another dimension. Any of those solutions simply delay preservation of information instead of destroying it.
Yet, if you put those same satellites in orbit around a black hole, GR math will fail in similar manner. Newtonian Physics works at very macro scales, same with GR Physics works at Atomic Scales, but as you go subatomic, GR fails. Additionally, GR doesn't properly account for even gravity at super scales.
I use this example, do you believe Geocentric model is accurate? How about Heliocentric models?
The fact is, neither Geocentric, nor Heliocentric models are accurate, as there is Galactic and Universal Models that are even more accurate. Geocentric is accurate enough for many things, and we still use Newtonian Physics for many types of "back of napkin" calculations, because the accuracy is "good enough" for such things.
The problem the all of these discussions is "how accurate, is accurate enough?" Geocentric is good enough for nomads in the desert, and making fun of them because they don't know about Heliocentric is false superiority. AND if you make fun of Geocentric belief systems, you should be aware that Heliocentric is no less "wrong" than Geocentric is (wrong is wrong)
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
I think you're on the right track there. What's more likely? Magical undetectable matter to explain a math flaw OR that we're wrong about how gravity really affects space and/or counted the amount of matter in the entire universe wrong and keep in mind, they just found out they were wrong for decades about one of our own solar system's planets' atmosphere contents. If they can't properly detect molecules that close, good luck estimating total mass from visible light at variable time delays, some 10 billion years out of date.
You forget that our current technology is woefully inadequate at totaling up all visible (and mostly invisible) matter in our galaxy. The ratio of dark matter isn't alleged to be like 10000000000:1, it's only like 9:1 or something like that. That's within the margin of simply counting visible mass incorrectly.
"That's what she said."
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
What happens to cosmic censorship?
But it sounds to me like Hawking is beating off.
This is just mental masturbation.
Well said, sir.
You have no idea what you're talking about. GPS has to be resynced because our clocks are imperfect, the path of GPS satellites is imperfect and there are tiny errors introduced by outside forces like the Earth's electromagnetic field. Satellites fail because we are incapable of building perfect, error-free machines. And quantum entanglement has nothing to do with relativity.
It's trivial to show General Relativity is wrong: It doesn't match observations.
Couldn't it instead be that our observations are incomplete? The as-yet lack of observation of WIMPs, for example.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Yes they use A-GPS - alongside regular GPS. That's why the 'A' stands for 'Assisted'.
No colour or religion ever stopped the bullet from a gun
The time dilation from the galaxy's gravity well and movement of stars around the galaxy are less than a part per million. It wouldn't hurt to double check that something weird can't amplify that effect, but otherwise that not even come close to dealing with things like stars going more than a factor of 2 slower than they should be otherwise, etc.
It doesn't matter what seems more likely. No one thought it was likely for the speed of light to be the same independent of inertial reference frame, but it is. Stop imposing your beliefs on nature.
Have physicists taken into account that the stars nearer the center of the galaxy are in a deeper gravity well and so will experience time at a different rate than the stars out at the edge
Yes, but only recently. They have also detected similar rings of gravitational lensing in galactic voids that have no observable matter, indicating huge amounts of invisible matter in areas with no other detectable matter within tens of millions of light years of the locations.
I presume what restricts us is our senses. No wonder we can't define feelings scientifically. May be the only way accelerate learning is by genetically modify us. Oops
information can escape from a black hole
Already proven by Facebook.
I love this comment...
Hawking is to me a joke now. I don't take his work seriously. He gave up his Scientific perspective & just now takes any new thing that might replace his theories & makes up new components of his theory.
Sure Relativity has it's problems...*why should we expect otherwise?*
We do not have our Theory of Everything yet...so, by logic, our theories will conflict at some point...otherwise we'd have a theory of everything!
Relativity & Quantum Physics don't need Hawking redefining Black Holes yet again to keep his work relevant.
This isn't an article about Science...it's PR for Stephen Hawking.
Thank you Dave Raggett
Yet, if you put those same satellites in orbit around a black hole, GR math will fail in similar manner.
You have no evidence of this though. The best we can do is look accurately and closely to satellites around smaller bodies, and so far they agree with GR predictions within limits of measurement errors and systematic errors from uncertainties of other things we know to affect satellites. This includes even a few specific cases that try to minimize some of those errors, instead of say looking at a typical commercial satellite that has, relatively speaking, large longer term uncertainties due to uncertainties in their course correcting and station keeping actions.
More like, What's more likely? Undetectable matter or our math being so wrong what we shouldn't have been able to put anything into orbit. You can estimate mass by looking at the orbits of two or more objects.
You're also talking about hiding hundreds of millions of solar masses worth of matter in plain sight. We should at least see a lot of dust or something. The gravity given off should alone cause the matter to give off at least some infrared.
Relativity is far from even remotely correct. It spits out infinities all over the place. Infinities don't exist in reality.
Actually relativity does not spit out infinities all over the place, is spits out a few infinities in some very extreme cases. If you want to see infinities spit out all over the place, look at QFT and google renormalization group.
They have to constantly resync GPS even WHILE USING it.
This is true of any technology using basic scientific models. The devices have inaccuracies of measurement, they have impurities in their tools, Often when designing these things, they add little tweaks called fudge factors to equations. THis whole process is called ENGINEERING, and it has very little to do with the correctness of science.
Duh it throws off your GPS. GPS makes use of GR. My argument is that the orbit of a satellite doesn't need to worry about GR unless your satellite in question is directly making use of GR for its services, like GPS. I didn't realize that relativity would cause enough de-oribiting in an Earth strong gravitational field within the lifetime of anything.
Decades of trolling the physics community and still going strong. Keep it up, Wheels!
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
(electrons DO NOT fall into the nucleus)
I get the feeling you are forgetting something... even if not explicitly mentioned in science courses like it is in the text books, you might have noticed that the electron is not pulled into the nucleus by the much strong electric force either, and that account for this played a big part in the history of the development of quantum mechanics.
It's a much less well supported theory than, say, evolution.
What quantitative predictions of evolution have been confirmed to better than parts per million levels?
so that the poles have coverage too.
Which was the whole point of GPS: to provide guidance along the shortest path from Minot, North Dakota to various target in the USSR.
Herbert Dingle proved this 40 years ago, of course he wasn't some hip twisted cripple freak inner circle occultist, and it was just not "fashionable" to come forward with the proof at that time in history. Now that the jig is up, the cripple freak admits that the dogma of physics that have been pushed all those years is of course, a sham.
Bravo, cripple freak
I've been saying for a long time that singularities don't exist, but I usually keep my opinion to myself because usually there are a few dozen people waiting to pounce on my neanderthal ideas.
Basically, if you shove a bunch of subatomic particles close enough together, what you have is an atomic nucleus. The more mass it contains, the less stable it is. An unstable nucleus doesn't collapse into a singularity; it breaks apart, because the weak and strong nuclear forces are 10^25 and 10^38 times stronger than the force of gravity at a subatomic range.
Nonetheless, it's ALL wonderful conjecture. It starts harmless discussions. Example: "Oh my goodness, there isn't enough matter to account for our calculated rotational model!" "Okay, Sparky, I'll play along. How TF do you know that? Did you weigh all galactic matter under controlled conditions? ALL OF IT? NO? Then STFU and GBTW because you have no idea how much matter there is in this galaxy. You can't even guess because INSUFFICIENT DATA, you neurotic freakin' dweeb! Go get me another beer."
The concept of 'magical undetectable matter' seems ludicrous from our day to day perspective but viewed from the point of view of physics it makes perfect sense. There are several forces (= ways for matter to interact). Not all forms of matter are affected by all these forces. For example neutrinos are oblivious to the electromagnetic and strong nuclear force which is why they can casually pass through what we think of as solid matter. Solid really means something that interacts with the electromagnetic force which holds particles together into what we call solid, liquid, gas and plasma. Neutrinos only interact with the weak nuclear force and gravity which is why they are so hard to detect - the weak force is puny and only rarely causes a neutrino to 'hit' something. To make 'dark matter' all that we need to postulate is a particle that does not even interact with the weak force. Such particles would be invisible and intangible to almost any sensor. There really is no reason to think that such a particle is impossible and given that it is so hard to make any measurements on it is not surprising that physicists are vague on the details.
Julian Barbour, I believe, is headed in the right direction. My 2 pence only.
Basically, time and space are separate, not inseparable, which helps deal with a lot of quantum/gravity inconsistencies.
But I am not a physicist/astrophysicist/etc
http://www.platonia.com/
http://www.platonia.com/ideas....
soylentnews.org Go there to enjoy the people!
It's like a straw-man has just been burned at the stake. The notion of religion you're citing seems to be derived from Jack Chick tracts (and the like). Read what he has to say about evolution sometime. I can assure you that his knowledge of historical Christianity goes no deeper.
No, its not. We have a reasonably good idea of the about of "visible" matter in the Galaxy because it is visible. Stars shine, and we can detect them right down to the hydrogen burning limit. Dust and gas clouds radiate at various wavelengths, and we can measure that too. We have a reasonably good idea of the amount of baryonic matter in the Galaxy. Even with generous uncertainties there is not enough to account for the Galactic rotation curve.
Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
Of course Relativity is flawed. The point is that it's far less flawed than Newtonian mechanics. And that so far nobody has yet managed to come up with something even less flawed. That's called science - there no room for Truth, only successively more accurate approximations.
If you have a better theory, please shareit, but it better be able to explain everything explained by Relativity, plus create entirely new predictions confirmed by reality. Otherwise expect to be laughed off the stage.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
You can only do what you are proposing if there is an "edge" and a "middle" to the universe.
We don't know if this is a valid assumption.
Do you have any evidence to suggest that there is a bound to the universe?
I already laughed him off the stage.
Damn it, they're moving? I thought it was my car!
Er meh gerd, we need Hawking in here to straighten this situation out!
I don't doubt for a minute that that's all you can say.
Why is Pi 3.14159...and not something else
I have been asking this question my entire life and have never come across anyone who even seems to understand the question. I try to explain by discussing the varying values of 'Pi' on a sphere, and that usually just confuses them.
They say something like "It doesn't matter." or "It just is." or "Because of proof X" (that answer is particularly funny, but most mathematicians seem to think that proofs are evidence.)"
No one (before you) has ever said "We don't know, and we can't know." (of course you then said it doesn't matter, that part I disagree with.)
I am not sure this is the right answer, or that it is satisfactory. But I salute you for admitting that there are (may be) some kinds of limits to our knowledge. I find it important to recognize and examine this concept, but in my experience almost nobody (especially not scientists or mathematicians.) have the ability to do this. At least not in any depth. Even philosophers get impatient with the discussion.
But I still want to know why Pi has the value it does, and what would the Universe be like if it was different. Or maybe Pi is just an illusion, since the perfect world of geometry and mathematics is just imaginary, or maybe ...
Probably why I never get past the introductory courses in Physics, Astronomy, or most branches of Maths. When a field starts out with unsatisfactory assumptions it is hard to stay focused on what is being built on what I cannot but suspect is a faulty foundation.
Your approach seems to reduce everything to Engineering, which may be the case, but boy that will enrage a lot of scientists.
On the other hand, people treat science as some kind of infallible process. That eventually, an answer will be found if we try hard enough. That science has a monopoly on truth. In reality, science has several fundamental limitations.
1. It assumes everything that exists is observable by humans -- directly or indirectly. It has nothing to say about that which cannot be observed.
2. It assumes everything that exists is measurable by humans -- that it can be somehow quantified and tested. It has nothing to say about that which cannot be measured.
3. It assumes everything that exists is comprehensible by humans. It has nothing to say about that which cannot be comprehended by human intelligence.
No-one is claiming science is able to understand everything that exists. There are whole categories to which science can never contribute anything useful (existence of an omnipotent being who wishes to remain unknown, existence of a truly omnipotent being who is just messing with the first one who only thinks he's omnipotent, last-Thursdayism, etc). However, and not at all coincidentally, *nothing* can ever contribute anything useful in those categories. You can choose to ignore them, or you can make up stories about them, but no approach will ever allow you to learn anything at all about them (and if you disagree with this statement, you need to go and look up what the word "omnipotent" means).
It's not that science is perfect - it's just demonstrably better than everything else anyone has ever come up with.
And THAT is hard to explain without dark matter.
The question I have is "Why do they assume that it's simple, and doesn't interact with itself?" Actually, since we're talking about, say, 9/10 of the matter in the universe, why don't we assume that there are 9 non-interacting kinds of dark matter, and that each of those kinds is as diverse as what we think of as normal matter?
Please note, I realize that this isn't in the standard model, but searches based on the standard model haven't been notably successful, so I don't see any reason to believe that it applies.
I know that they think they're applying Occam's Razor, but that's only looking at it in one direction. From another direction since we rarely encounter anything that's homogeneous, to assume that something you can't really see is homogeneous appears to be a violation of Occam's Razor (though, admittedly, not as much a violation as would the assumption of any partiuclar variation). But every time that I can recall when we've assumed that the things we don't really understand are simple and unitary, we've been wrong.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
No! No! No!
We have done VERY few experiments at geostationary orbit. It's very hard to get to, and the signal lag is noticiable, so it's only useful for one-way links.
The experiments were done at Near Earth Orbit. The GPS systems *could* be in geostationary orbit, but that would be both the broadcast and receiver would need to be more powerful. Nobody made that choice, because it's stupid (in this decade, or last decade, and probably next decade). For that to be a good choice you need to have extremely sensitive receivers (compared to those we have today) and powerful broadcast signals (compared to those we use today). Not something I feel comfortable in predicting. And if you had all the necessaries, geostationary orbits are already getting crowded. So the savings in the number of sattelites used wouldn't pay for the choice of orbit.
Note that media channels have a very different set of tradeoffs, and for them it makes sense. But even then direct to end-user isn't popular. The ground stations are too large and expensive. It might make sense for a small town, or a large trailer park Perhaps for a really large apartment house. But why wouldn't the apartment house or the trailer park already have cable?
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Um.... *requests refund from Hawking on several books predicated on black holes existing*
look, I don't understand why I have to suck up to Hawking by quoting his resume to you in order to criticize his science
he's a scientist and public figure who presented research...fair game...i know he's a genius & has done great work but **fuck that**
what is THIS theory? seriously read through this thread...so many /.'ers dont even discuss the actual theory or physics or cosmology they just argue about Hawking
I want to discuss the actual research & theory
no, it will be a statement that **Hawking's Version** of Black Holes do not exist...which we already know anyway
Hawking is not the be-all-end-all of black hole research...his cosmology was & still is popular but he's become biased egregiously to his own legacy
Black Holes are bubbles of Quantum Foam. They are the same as what is beyond the horizon of the universe itself. The Event Horizon simultaneously has a quantum entaglement with anything that touches it's surface (the hologram) then all that it was, light, matter, radiation, etc etc. gets turned into the pure randomness of the black hole itself.
Black Holes are truly pure nothingness. Nothing escapes it but the total area of the event horizon expands in relation to the matter/energy that touches it.
Hawking is a genius but he crosses the line of scientific skepticism. He's actually a very biased scientist promoting an agenda. His book a brief history of time has a late chapter where he theorizes that a 'god' could not exist in two of 4 types of universes...one being a universe that ends in heat death. He crosses the line of skepticism into promoting an agenda.
you could defend him by noting that none other than Sir Issac Newton did the same thing...but Newton's reputation and his enduring work are separate things...one is hype one is what matters to this discussion. Newton's theories were **helpful**...I'm sorry that Hawking felt Cambridge crammed them down is throat like dogma but the solution is not to react in the opposite way!
Thank you Dave Raggett
Well...you can renormalize the equations so that the time dimension is flat. But that makes the spacial positions a lot more difficult to calculate.
Personally, I think that gravity is an affect of a combination of time dilation and the uncertainty principle. This is a bit hard to visualize, and I couldn't begin to write down the equations, but I think it's because where time is moving more slowly, if a particle is there, it stays there longer than it would where the time is moving slightly faster. The particle is unitary, but diffuse, so part of it is higher in the field than the rest of it. That part will change it's probability of being there faster than will the part that's in the denser (i.e., slower) part of the field, so it will change its proable position more rapidly, but it will be constrained to maintain it's distance from the part that is slower, and given the 3-d nature of space (when separated from time) it will tend to end up in a slower part of the field. Note that this is all probabilistic, and is modeling particles as if they were pieces of sponge rubber. Not too accurate. To really do this you need to be calculating the probability of detecting a particle at position p1 at time t1 if it started at p0 at t0, but this won't work, because I'm considering different parts of the "probability of detection" as being modified by the rate of flow of time at their location.
YARGH!! The math is WAY over my head. And I may be wrong. But it gets rid of gravity as anything separate from the bending of space by mass. Of course, if gravitons are ever detected, that probably means this theory is dead. Unless, of course, they are sort of like gluons (Have gluons been detected? Can they be detected?) in being the thing that causes space to warp.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Have physicists taken into account that the stars nearer the center of the galaxy are in a deeper gravity well and so will experience time at a different rate than the stars out at the edge
Yes, but only recently. They have also detected similar rings of gravitational lensing in galactic voids that have no observable matter, indicating huge amounts of invisible matter in areas with no other detectable matter within tens of millions of light years of the locations.
What if the permittivity/permeability constants of that "void" areas aren't that constant as we assume they are?
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
If you'd said Special Relativity, I might have agreed with you, but I believe that General Relativity is on a less sound footing than is QED.
That said, both have been tested in enough places, that it will be quite difficult for any theory to replace them. But one is definitely needed, or SOME such, because they keep making predictions (that are quite hard to check) where they contradict each other. But I can't think of any prediction where they were in contradiction where it was possible for us to check and see which was correct. This "Great Firewall" is a good example. How do you look to check who was right? Or is the best answer to just redifine what a Black Hole is so that the contradiction disappears? (Hawking seems to think he can do that.)
Perhaps it's another version of the principle of complementarity. The two theories don't predict the same things, but they can never come into actual conflict, because no observation of such is possible.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
"why is Pi 3.14159"
It's a proportion, what is the "why' supposed to answer? Why is a curved line curved?
There is actually a large gap between the amount of predicted baryonic matter in the universe and what we've accounted for by observation. Astronomers know they are missing some baryonic matter, although through other observations have some estimates on upper bounds of what they could be missing. We're still a long was from accounting any where near the vast majority of baryonic matter that dark matter theories even say exist.
Basically, if you shove a bunch of subatomic particles close enough together, what you have is an atomic nucleus. The more mass it contains, the less stable it is.
Then particle accelerators wouldn't work. If there was some maximum density that could not be exceeded, especially if it were the density of a typical atom nucleus, then particle accelerators would not have been able to probe smaller structures. And they just use simply inertia. You also have to be careful thinking of the strong and weak forces as being something that just gets stronger the closer you get, yet gravity as far as we've seen keeps getting stronger the more you pile stuff on.
Have physicists taken into account that the stars nearer the center of the galaxy are in a deeper gravity well and so will experience time at a different rate than the stars out at the edge
Yes, but only recently. They have also detected similar rings of gravitational lensing in galactic voids that have no observable matter, indicating huge amounts of invisible matter in areas with no other detectable matter within tens of millions of light years of the locations.
What if the permittivity/permeability constants of that "void" areas aren't that constant as we assume they are?
That would actually be really obvious - you'd get massive discontinuities at the boundary regions where the constants started changing, since ordinary matter straying into those regions would be re-arranged at a subatomic level - atoms flying apart, new ones forming, light being stretched and compressed etc.
Yet, if you put those same satellites in orbit around a black hole, GR math will fail in similar manner...Additionally, GR doesn't properly account for even gravity at super scales.
Is that right? I was under the impression GR is supposed to work fine orbiting a black hole, and that you only ran into problems once you got close to the singularity, because at that point it's dealing with small scales. Simultaneously, quantum mechanics is unlikely to work there either, because it's dealing with very large gravity in small scales. Basically, the singularity is the point where you run outside the scope where either theory works correctly: GR works well with gravity at large scales, but works poorly at small scales, and quantum mechanics works well at small scales, but doesn't work well when gravity is a significant factor (therefore the need for the development of a quantum gravity theory).
I'm not a physicist though, so I'd be glad to be corrected if my understanding is incorrect.
QED is the most proven theory in the history of science...computing things out to ~15 significant digits...
without GR, your GPS accuracy would be limited to about 100 feet...not nearly so bad as to incorrectly place you in the right country.
Proofs excist only in mathematics. Physics has to get done with only disproofs. An apple falling towards ground for ten times, unfortunately does not logically prove that it will do that for eleventh time, even if it makes it a pretty reasonable assumption.
We do know why the value of Pi is what it is, just take the simplest formula used to compute Pi and explain it in terms of its subcomponents until you arrive at the axioms of whatever theory that formula is based on.
And before anyone answers that question, they should probably read this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_principle/
Some smart guys have given the matter some thought.
Oh how naive you are...
The combination of these two relativitic effects means that the clocks on-board each satellite should tick faster than identical clocks on the ground by about 38 microseconds per day (45-7=38)! This sounds small, but the high-precision required of the GPS system requires nanosecond accuracy, and 38 microseconds is 38,000 nanoseconds. If these effects were not properly taken into account, a navigational fix based on the GPS constellation would be false after only 2 minutes, and errors in global positions would continue to accumulate at a rate of about 10 kilometers each day! The whole system would be utterly worthless for navigation in a very short time.
No colour or religion ever stopped the bullet from a gun
I am Cornhawkingo. I need TP* for my blackhole.
*theoretical physics
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
No black hole? Oh yes there is. There is a large black hole in Stephen Hawking soul.
I'm religious, and don't want anything. If I'm wrong, oh well. If you're wrong, oh boy!
And don't say 'I know I'm not wrong' because then you have confused yourself with god.
I find most athiests/agnostics are just trying to make fun of people so they feel smart / superior.
How's that for painting a bunch of morons like you with a wide brush?
Now go figure out how life began if there was never a creation event.
Have physicists taken into account that the stars nearer the center of the galaxy are in a deeper gravity well and so will experience time at a different rate than the stars out at the edge
Yes, but only recently. They have also detected similar rings of gravitational lensing in galactic voids that have no observable matter, indicating huge amounts of invisible matter in areas with no other detectable matter within tens of millions of light years of the locations.
What if the permittivity/permeability constants of that "void" areas aren't that constant as we assume they are?
That would actually be really obvious - you'd get massive discontinuities at the boundary regions where the constants started changing, since ordinary matter straying into those regions would be re-arranged at a subatomic level - atoms flying apart, new ones forming, light being stretched and compressed etc.
Ahhh?? How come? I mean, it doesn't need to be a "boundary region" per se, the "constant" may vary gradually, within a small percentage and over large distances.
And, except for variation of several orders of magnitude that would bring the electron orbits inside the nucleus, why would "atoms fly apart"? Their orbitals would modify spatially, but I imagine the orbitals' energy could still remain the same.
Yes, light may be stretched/compressed in the same manner it happens within a lens. Wouldn't this explain a "gravitational lensing"?
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
"The firewall went down, the massive server exploded, and now your information is lost in a black hole. Sorry about that. We might however be able to get a small portion of it back, as it still appears to be transmitting information in high frequency streams on either side. The receiver we placed to get that information fluctuates a bit and might catch on fire, however, so no guarantees."
I followed it up with one of the senior engineers who's worked on this server for years and they told me there was no black hole, just someone forgot to plug in the backup system.
A building is built flat by first cleaving off part of the spherical Earth it will be sitting on. Once that is done, a flat surface remains. No flat Earth assumption is required.
And we don't assume the Earth is flat when building a suspension bridge, as we build each tower vertically, despite that making them not parallel to each other.
I come here for the love
Yes, absolutely. And when WIMPs are discovered, we will then know.
Is it just me, or is Hawking overrated? How is this idea new?
So then GR isn't trivially shown to be wrong. Right?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Accounted for.
What if the permittivity/permeability constants of that "void" areas aren't that constant as we assume they are?
Those constants for a vacuum are fixed values, as like many constants depending on the size of a particular unit, you can choose some to be fixed depending on how you define the unit. But even if they varied from the normal value for a vacuum, then some parts of space would act like materials with different index of refraction or like any other stuff we are quite familiar with because doing E&M with materials involves drastic changes in those values. Depending on exactly how you change it, you would get different spectra for things we know the spectrum to high levels of precision though.
What if the permittivity/permeability constants of that "void" areas aren't that constant as we assume they are?
Those constants for a vacuum are fixed values, as like many constants depending on the size of a particular unit, you can choose some to be fixed depending on how you define the unit.
No, that wasn't the type of "different value for a assumed constant" I was talking about.
But even if they varied from the normal value for a vacuum, then some parts of space would act like materials with different index of refraction or like any other stuff we are quite familiar with because doing E&M with materials involves drastic changes in those values. Depending on exactly how you change it, you would get different spectra for things we know the spectrum to high levels of precision though.
Suppose that those constant are different in a part of the universe. Suppose that a transition between two level of energy in a hydrogen atom take place and a photon is emitted. Suppose this photon enters a space with values for the two constants as known to us (thus, the photon travels now with "our" speed of light)
Question: except the geometry of the travel path (which may be as coming through a lens), would there be any difference in the frequency between that photon and one emitted by an atom in, say, our Sun?
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
"It spits out infinities all over the place"
Actually, it doesn't. It spits out infinities in some metrics, notably the Schwarzchild and Kerr metrics, in the presence of a "real black hole", until you use a metric based on Rindler coordinates, or take some other approach towards avoiding a *mathematical* singularity appearing at the same point as a *physical* singularity.
Hawking's argument has nothing at all to do with black holes as a mathematical singularity, and everything to do with whether there is some real source of degeneracy pressure too strong for gravitation to overcome sufficiently to create a physical event horizon.
It is an interesting argument, and one that is motivated by the real effects of electron degeneracy pressure in white dwarfs, neutron degeneracy in neutron stars, and so forth.
It is not really hard to think about further degeneracy levels -- quark stars have already been proposed -- but with no particle content beyond the Standard Model yet seen in laboratories, it is probably too hard to fit many more sources of pressure into supermassive black holes like Sgr A* or even more massive compact objects.
Thus, while Hawking's idea might lead to a more palatable tradeoff among "no drama", unitarity, locality, causality and the gauge/gravity correspondence that the "firewalls" problem exposes -- not all of those can be true at the event horizon. Hawking's idea is geared towards protecting unitarity and "no drama" but at the cost, as Polchinski notes, of abandoning causality. Or more specifically, he trades away local causal evolution for local fluctuations in the false vacuum, which is something like saying that everywhere a massive compact object that *looks* like a black hole appears, so too does a whale and a bowl of petunias thinking "Oh no, not again". And that returns us to the regularly scheduled Boltzmann Brains argument...
There are plenty of other tradeoffs being offered in the "firewalls" debate, none of them obviously correct, and all of them with something that makes them unappetizing to various sets of working scientists armed with good observational and experimental fits for their physical theories.
It's trivial to demonstrate that it doesn't match observations and that is the only valid test of a theory or hypothesis. If at some point in the future observation and theory are reconciled then that's a different matter.
No, that wasn't the type of "different value for a assumed constant" I was talking about.
It is something you need to think about very carefully, as for some constants like that you can't just change the number and get a meaningful result, unless you change the number in certain ways relative to other constants. In the end, this means that a unitless constant somewhere changes, as opposed to just getting something that changes labels on an axis somewhere.
Suppose that those constant are different in a part of the universe. Suppose that a transition between two level of energy in a hydrogen atom take place and a photon is emitted. Suppose this photon enters a space with values for the two constants as known to us (thus, the photon travels now with "our" speed of light)
Question: except the geometry of the travel path (which may be as coming through a lens), would there be any difference in the frequency between that photon and one emitted by an atom in, say, our Sun?
If those constant change such that the fine structure constant is different, you will get different spectra for hydrogen.
"The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it." Scoffers will scoff but "Jesus is Lord."
Ian Wolfe / P3NDRA60N
I have lots of black friends and they all have holes. I'm pretty sure they all have event horizons too. In the meantime I need to go drop some dark matter.
... it's dark matter being concentrated due a supernova collapsing on itself drawing fragments of dark matter that is continually compressing into itself that eventually creates a vacuum engulfing any physical matter within it's immediate environment.
No, no...the Event Horizon of the Black Hole does all that.
The black hole itself is something that **NO** information can escape from, including light.
The Event Horizon is the continual process of matter/energy being consumed by the black hole...it is the thing that gives off "Hawking Radiation"
Thank you Dave Raggett
Do you know how many episodes of Stargate that's just ruined? And how many classic Science Fiction books got trashed by that if it's true? For literature's sake , sir we MUST have black holes !
a simple two page resolution of the information paradox was presented at last spring's Rochester Conference on Quantum Information and Measurement http://www.opticsinfobase.org/abstract.cfm?URI=QIM-2013-W6.01
for those who are not American Optical Society members, this paper can be found at
http://vixra.org/author/peter_cameron
this happens to me too...fanbois screw up the whole spectrum, b/c I'm not nearly as strongly 'anti-Hawking' as the fanbois are the opposite...it's the same with all fanbois. Another example, Gerard 't Hooft is a spokesman for Mars One, something Im highly critical of...but 'tHooft is of course an amazing physicist.
Hawking is still a real scientist. I'd love to have a converstation with him in some manner.
to develop my Event Horizon comment further, I should have said, "the event horizon of the black hole obliterates everything after the holographic moment"
so in a sense, the instant after anything meets the event horizon, it becomes quantum entangled at the edge & then becomes pure randomness, which is the same as being destroyed..all information then is retained at the moment of destruction...the eventn horizon itself is the balance preserving the thermodynamics laws as it expands in relation to what it absorbs and sometimes emits radiation of its own...
this is an extention of the holographic principle
Thank you Dave Raggett
Thnx Anita Hunt.
Note that my explanation isnt quite commonly accepted but IMHO it is the loose consensus among scientists who I respect.
This guy, Lawrence M. Krauss would definitely disagree with my characterization of what happens at the Event Horizon.Here he is on the Colbert Report talking about his (bogus IMHO) theories. He's great but I just differ.
See, in the Quantum Foam, Heat Death universe that I propose & Hawking is against thermodynamics is maintained because the Event Horizon itself, the very edge, has angular momentum, etc and can emmit radiation
Here's the difference, at the Event Horizon the Holographic moment is when anything touches the actual Event Horizon it instantly becomes Quantum Entangled then **obliterated**
The black hole obliterates everything into pure nothingness/randomness, which preserves the Thermodynamics laws & works with QED via Quantum Foam theories.
Thank you Dave Raggett
"The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it." This applies not only to black holes but also to the minds of lost men who are "always learning but never able to come to the knowledge of the truth." Hear Jesus's words regarding those who are considered wise and intelligent in this world, "I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children." God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble. Satan is very very real and most of the world knowingly and unknowingly are worshiping him(many many "churchgoers" will be in hell just in case you didn't think God was fair.) For all you people who absolutely must have a scientific sign and evidence that God exists I can't help you. If you want empirical evidence that either Satan exists or that the world is run by people that claims he exists and they worship him, mountains and mountains of evidence can be provided. Hidden in plain sight(one of their mantras) is quite an understatement to the learned. Satan's crew runs this world and you are dumb as a door nail if you search this matter out and come to any other conclusion. If you know or come to know who runs the world and you still deny or won't turn to Christ then I truly fear for you the day you stand before the Living God in judgement(we will all have to give account for who we've been.) I would apologize for the Jesus plug but I won't because I hope someone might at some point be led to the saving knowledge of Christ's sacrifice for them. I love the /. community as they are so bright in many areas and I like to see what's what in the world so don't think I'm just trolling. Every believer is called to share the gospel of God's truth(though many are fearful of the worlds judgement of them/I prefer to fear God instead) Next time you get mad at a Christian for sharing their faith with you consider that they will receive judgement from God if they don't and quite literally your blood will be on their hands if they neglect to share the truth of God's love for you and the necessity for repentance.
God Bless,
P3NDRA60N ~ Ian Wolfe(momma didn't raise no coward : )
how much taxpayer money gets wasted on guys like this?
we pay for the research of scientists, then they get to keep the spoils (patents, nobel prizes, credibility, etc) and we get to pay for it again as spinoffs
being a taxpayer is akin to slavery
Have physicists taken into account that the stars nearer the center of the galaxy are in a deeper gravity well and so will experience time at a different rate than the stars out at the edge
Yes, but only recently. They have also detected similar rings of gravitational lensing in galactic voids that have no observable matter, indicating huge amounts of invisible matter in areas with no other detectable matter within tens of millions of light years of the locations.
What if the permittivity/permeability constants of that "void" areas aren't that constant as we assume they are?
That would actually be really obvious - you'd get massive discontinuities at the boundary regions where the constants started changing, since ordinary matter straying into those regions would be re-arranged at a subatomic level - atoms flying apart, new ones forming, light being stretched and compressed etc.
Ahhh?? How come? I mean, it doesn't need to be a "boundary region" per se, the "constant" may vary gradually, within a small percentage and over large distances.
And, except for variation of several orders of magnitude that would bring the electron orbits inside the nucleus, why would "atoms fly apart"? Their orbitals would modify spatially, but I imagine the orbitals' energy could still remain the same.
Yes, light may be stretched/compressed in the same manner it happens within a lens. Wouldn't this explain a "gravitational lensing"?
Without knowing the exact nature of the change your proposing it's hard to estimate what the precise effects would be, but needless to say the fundamental constants varying in a consistent manner over a region of space would still produce dramatic effects. Modifying that changes all sorts of energy levels - parallel plate capacitors which are charged to an energy in one region of space are suddenly not in another. They'd experience forces counter-acting the energy change - and that's an ideal system. In an atomic system you'd have atoms which suddenly had to shed excess energy somehow - you'd get huge structures of these which would look unlike anything else in the universe (since it'd be a ghost force not explainable as gravity or conventional electromagnetism).
And it very much would be a subatomic re-arrangement - those constants are involved in every level of physics and chemistry. Changes would not result in "simple" results, you'd get massively emergent effects. But probably most importantly, all of this would happen to visible matter - it would be very obvious because we'd see something which didn't make sense with normal forces. Dark matter is notable because the only thing we see is unusual gravitational attraction, and nothing else.
Matter of fact, it's all dark...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Matter of fact, it's all dark......
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Who said anything about GPS? There there is plenty of stuff in geosynchronous orbit that need a clock accuracy that requires taking relativity into account, and has been from way before GPS, regardless of where the first experiments to demonstrate the effect took place.
In any case, proof at NEO invalidates the newtonian prediction, and I know of no model that predicts that the problem would exist at NEO but go away at higher altitudes.
sudo ergo sum
According to particle physics they could exist, although no theory has predicted their existence in the same way that the existence of the positron was predicted (by Dirac, was it, I forget). WIMPs are postulated because the visible matter in the universe accounts for only 5% of that needed according to current cosmological theories. The invisible "stuff" is required to make the theory work. It isn't itself predicted to exist by the theory.
What I'm not sure of, is which theory exactly predicts that the universe should have a lot more matter? I know that one does, I'm just not sure if it's GR that makes the prediction. Any links containing more info as to which theory makes these predictions?
GPS satellite programmer here. I can confirm that problems with GPS positioning mathematics have mostly to due with the precise calculations of non-integer numbers, and nothing whatsoever to do with problems with relativistic mechanics.
Hawking, Einstein, Bohr, Planck, Newton are theoretical physicist, sort of like great artist that sculpt what they perceive. Unlike theoretical mathematicians (Descartes, Gödel, Whitehead, Leibniz ) theoretical physicists do no abstract art. Together these two groups of artist (AKA: theoretical scientist) have provided the greatest science, technology, and art advances in human history (not Pdity a/o Jesus). Boneheads that have insulted Doc Hawking, or others, should show some respect for their obviously betters.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
GR doesn't predict it, but the motions of stars in galaxies does not conform to what you would expect from GR. You need to add in a lot more mass, a kind-of halo around the galaxy of invisible "stuff" to get the correct figures.
Exactly.
Over 2,500 years ago, people believed the Earth was flat. Then people believed it was spherical. Then, around 400 years ago, people believed it was an oblate spheroid. Now we believe it's a lumpy potatoid (even taking local topography into account).
Those who believed the Earth was spherical were wrong (only Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo still believe this), but still, they were less wrong than those who believed it was flat.
Relativity is wrong. But it's less wrong than Newtonian mechanics.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Or maybe Stephen is right. Maybe the real problem is that all science is in its infancy and fundamentally flawed because we change the physical reality of any given scientific experiment by simply observing it. That's why they made 2 series of laws for physics, one for which no human eye, camera or any kind of recording instrument is used until after the experiment had taken place and one set of laws that ironically follow one general constant; atoms behave as we would expect them to when we're watching them but exist in multiple places simultaneously when atoms are not being observed. So whom really has the right to claim they know anything in comparison to the complexity and diversity of the universe we are just starting to probe our way into the abyss.