Stephen Hawking Suggests Black Holes Are Possible Portals To Another Universe (scienceworldreport.com)

An anonymous reader shares an article on Science World Report: Stephen Hawking, in a recent lecture held at the Harvard University, claimed that black holes could be portals to a parallel universe. The celebrated physicist spoke at length about black holes and suggested that they neither store materials absorbed by them nor physical information about the object that created them. Known as the information paradox, the theory goes against the scientific rule that information on a system belonging to a particular time can be used to understand its state at a different time. Over the years, it has been speculated that black holes do not retain information about the stars from which they are formed, except storing their electrical charge, angular momentum and mass. According to Hawking, as per that theory, it was believed that identical black holes might be formed by an infinite quantity of matter configurations. However, quantum mechanics has signaled the opposite by revealing that black holes could only be formed by particles with explicit wavelengths. If the characteristics of the bodies that create black holes are not deprived, then they include a lot of information that is not revealed to the outside world, according to the physicist. "For more than 200 years, we have believed in the science of determinism, that is that the laws of science determine the evolution of the universe" Stephen Hawking said. If information was lost in black holes, we wouldn't be able to predict the future because the black hole could emit any collection of particles."This is in contrast to some of Hawking's earlier views. In 2014, for instance, Hawking suggested that black holes don't exist, at least not like we think.

Comments

Determinism?

[Viol8]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought quantum theory killed that 100 years ago so whats the problem?

Re:Determinism?

[__aaclcg7560]

The problem is undetermined.

Re:Determinism?

[Anonymous Coward]

Basically the universe splits into two at each quantum decision, so the universe as a whole with all its branching is deterministic, while each copy of yourself in that ever-branching universe only sees one sequence of quantum decisions and thinks that it's random.

Re:Determinism?

[DroolTwist]

You're thinking of undeterminism, not determinism.

Re:Determinism?

[Flavianoep]

No, it was not determinism that quantum theory killed. Under Heisenberg's incorrectly named "principle of uncertainty," the exact position and momentum of a physical system cannot be measured a at the same time, but that doesn't mean they are undetermined, just that we cannot measure both of them at the same time. The term for it is Unschärferelation, that roughly translates as "unsharpness relationship", but due to Slashdot's lack of support of Unicode at the time, it was not possible to keep that in the original German, so the translation "principle of uncertainty" was adopted [source].

Re:Determinism?

[__aaclcg7560]

It's indeterminate. ;)

Re:Determinism?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's completely wrong. It's a bizarre religious rant from a desperate Newtonian trying to hold on to their belief in a billiard-ball universe. By measuring position more accurately, for example, momentum actually become less definite. It's not a limitation on what we can measure, but a limitation on what is. We cannot measure both properties precisely not because of some difficulty in measuring, but because the properties themselves are more or less defined depending on what we measure. This is difficult for religious zealots to comprehend, much like how some properties simply don't exist until measured (not unknown, but don't exist) as demonstrated in experiments testing Bell's inequality. It's difficult for them because they can't conceptualize it. If they can't grasp it intuitively, for them, it must not be true, regardless of what the science shows us.

Consequently, you're a religious science denier.

Re:Determinism?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it was not determinism that quantum theory killed. Under Heisenberg's incorrectly named "principle of uncertainty," the exact position and momentum of a physical system cannot be measured a at the same time, but that doesn't mean they are undetermined,

Nope. It does really mean that they are undetermined, regardless of our measurements. There is no hidden variables. Quantum world is *really* that strange/uncanny,

Re:Determinism?

[Anonymous Coward]

Until you realise that even a infinite multiverse is not large enough to contain Infinite^infinite universes. One of the branch get killed, always. And therefore viewing it as a branching process is only a thought experiment that has no ground in reality and display how ignorant you are about how the universe, life and everything work.

Re:Determinism?

[AchilleTalon]

You should terminate this conversation.

Re:Determinism?

[AchilleTalon]

Well, you should be more accurate. So far, what all the experiments demonstrated using the Bell's inequalities is there is no local hidden variables.

Re:Determinism?

[__aaclcg7560]

Only at the event horizon.

Re:Determinism?

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that Stewen Hawking is a rolling joke - he is not determined about what he says.

Re:Determinism?

[Austerity Empowers]

Before we go down the road of namecalling, how about trying to offer up a proof? Most of us do not learn quantum mechanics in school, nor is it relevant to our lives in a direct way, thus all we have are vague and imprecise english to summarize things, and as it happened, most of the key people in this field were German. And that's why we use math and not english to talk about science.

My attempt, and I am probably wrong I took one semester of modern physics to satisfy a degree requirement, is that if p=mv, (where p is momentum, not position), you can see clearly that uncertainty is mathematical definite, not an empirical approximate as derived from newtonian physics. Position is the first derivative of velocity, defined as lim(h->0) (v(t+h)+v(t))/h. As h approaches 0, this equation blows up to plus or minus infinity. Thus if we know velocity precisely, we thus cannot be sure about position: that equation explodes. Going the other way, if we know position precisely, we have no way of knowing velocity (change in position) without a second data point. If we know two positions precisely, we only know average velocity (h>0, above). Thus the best we can do is describe these quantities simultaneously is using stochastic methods. This is another branch of mathematics that most of us never touch, and makes reading actual quantum mechanics theories very challenging.

That it is a mathematical impossibility to resolve this uncertainty derives directly from newtonian physics, no quantum magic required. Now you can still cling to the hidden state argument: that just because we cannot know these things does not mean they do not exist: possibly your billiard ball has a definitely position and definite velocity and it is our mathematical model that is not up to the task. This boils down to an unhelpful theory is unhelpful, we can assume they exist, but we can only approximate their values so back to square 1. In quantum mechanics, this idea of hidden state has been continuously asserted and refuted via empirical testing. That doesn't mean it's wrong, we may still be entirely ignorant about what is really going on, that's what scientists do and why every time they say they're "almost done", something crazy happens. It seems to me that a lot of scientists are willing to let the very odd behaviors they see in quantum mechanics pass by rather than seeking a deeper truth.

On the other hand, a lot of useful things can be done with the state-free model, and that's where I prove myself again to be an engineer and not a scientist - if a model exists that i can use to build something, it is good enough for me.

Re:Determinism?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure how you infer that the capacities of an infinite multiverse would have to be limited. How many branches can it contain at the same time according to you, 42?

Re:Determinism?

[Anonymous Coward]

Keep your filthy tree pruning algorithms way from the non-constructive models of others!

Re:Determinism?

[Anonymous Coward]

We will, at a determined time.

Re:Determinism?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, 6 * 9.

Re:Determinism?

[lgw]

Nope. It does really mean that they are undetermined, regardless of our measurements. There is no hidden variables. Quantum world is *really* that strange/uncanny,

The whole "there are no hidden variables" thing is just an quick English phrase standing in for complex math. Don't read to much into it.

The wave function is completely deterministic, forwards and backwards. Real-world observables like position and momentum are not state captured by the wave function - nothing in classical physics is, really. It's the mapping between the wave function and what we can observe that is non-deterministic (well, again, the math is more complex than the English, but it's partly non-deterministic in a complicated way).

The best way to think about this is that intuitive properties like position and momentum are emergent from a complex system. An electron simply isn't a point particle with a specific position - it's not that it's non-deterministic, so much as the idea is just wrong - but at human scale a table still has a defined surface, made up of a bunch of electrons giving the illusion of solidity.

Re:Determinism?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is still a deterministic evolution of the quantum state. We just can't directly measure the quantum state, instead we measure observables.

A crude analogy consider the quantum state to be the (x,y) location of the minute hand of an analog clock with the length of the hand equal to 1. The observable is an integer measurement of the horizontal (x) position of the hand which rounds the values randomly. If the x value is 0.75 there's a 75% chance of measuring 1 and a 25% chance of measuring 0. The minute hand is still moving deterministically, but our measurements are random.

With information loss, the movement of the hand would no longer be deterministic.

Re:Determinism?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's true, global hidden variables are possible but would be EVEN STRANGER than the Copenhagen Interpretation.

I mean, proper crazy. We can't necessarily detect global hidden variables, but one sign they exist would be that Quantum Computers mysteriously don't scale up. Like you figure out how to build one that's twice as powerful, all the theory works, the individual components work, but the complete computer just mysteriously doesn't work and you can't find the problem. This would be because if there IS global hidden state then Quantum Computers are effectively leveraging it as intermediate storage, the more powerful the computer the more storage is used, when you run out the computer "breaks" unexpectedly. One interpretation is that our universe is a cheap simulation for which not enough disk space was allocated to store all the hidden state variables that make it work.

Yeah, right.

Re:Determinism?

[Anonymous Coward]

Real physicists, not punk kids who took an intro class when they were undergraduates, agree with the AC above. It's been challenged and tested far more completely than your hunches and intuitions.

Perhaps you should spend less time on internet forums with armchair physicists, with little more than a high school diploma, and more time in the classroom. You're denying science because you think QM is "magic". That makes you a science denier.

Re:Determinism?

[Anonymous Coward]

If your measurement changes another value, then you are measuring incorrectly.

Re:Determinism?

[rochrist]

You could try not being a major dick.

Re:Determinism?

[Anonymous Coward]

are you certain?

Re:Determinism?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your reading comprehension suggests an IQ under 80, a penis under 3" and a strong inclination towards prison rape scenes.

Re: Determinism?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry your physics is a bit rusty. Speed is a first derivative of position. First derivative of speed is acceleration. This basic high school stuff. And your definition of the derivative is incorrect, too. If you fail this, you should not attempt discussing anything more advanced.

Re: Determinism?

[Anonymous Coward]

probably

Re: Determinism?

[Anonymous Coward]

An absolutely unhelpful attitude that ensures people distrust you and everything you write.

It seems to me as if he has velocity and position backwards, but his definition of a derivative is correct and the general idea is correct.

Your pedantry is incorrect in that "speed" is incorrect, you mean velocity, a vector quantity. Simple high school stuff, you really shouldn't be discussing anything more advanced.

Re:Determinism?

[Wargames]

It seems we are all alone in this together.

Re:Determinism?

[Wargames]

Or... the event/act-ual creation of a quantum computer changes the universe in/which it does.

Re:Determinism?

[Applehu Akbar]

"Until you realise that even a infinite multiverse is not large enough to contain Infinite^infinite universes."

Georg Cantor, one of the endless array of white phones in front of you is ringing. And you will not find out which one if you spend the rest of your life looking for it.

Re: Determinism?

[c4t3l]

Damn this copy-on-write universe!

Re:Determinism?

[Anonymous Coward]

IAAQP and your argument is known among quantum physicists, and physicists in general, as bullshit.

Re:Determinism?

[Jamu]

Position is the first derivative of velocity, defined as lim(h->0) (v(t+h)+v(t))/h. As h approaches 0, this equation blows up to plus or minus infinity.

It can do that, but physical derivatives are usually well-behaved. Even General Relativity is mostly well-behaved except for the singularities inside black holes, and maybe the ones outside (toroidal) black holes. Take v(t) = 0 as a trivial example. lim(h->0) (0 + 0)/h. As h approaches 0, this equation is equal to 0. Scientists accept the "odd" behaviors of quantum mechanics because they agree with experiment. A deterministic theory would have "odd" behaviors too. If you want to see why, here might be a good starting point.

Re:Determinism?

[david_thornley]

If your measurement changes another value, then you are measuring incorrectly.

In which case there's plenty of things on the quantum level that we can't measure correctly. Fortunately, this doesn't stop actual scientists.

Re:Determinism?

[david_thornley]

So what happens when we observe something? At that point, the thing we're observing is in a particular state, regardless of what the wave function was earlier, and the wave function has changed accordingly in an unpredictable way.

Re:Determinism?

[david_thornley]

You're assuming that an object has a hidden variable that determines the probability of what is measured. That has been examined and found to be false (see Bell's theorem). There are no local hidden variables.

Re:Determinism?

[RockDoctor]

and as it happened, most of the key people in this field were German

Hmmm, there certainly were some Germans. But "most"? Off the top of my head, there was de Broglie (French), Bohr (Danish), Planck (German), Heisenberg (German), Compton (American), Einstein (Swiss, most of the time), Schroedinger (Austrian), Born (German), von Neumann (Hungarian), Dirac (English), Pauli (Austrian), [list continues]. Certainly there were plenty of German speakers in the development, but probably not even a majority.

In any case, if this were true, why would this be an excuse to do anything other than learn sufficient German? I'm doing exactly that at the moment, though for family reasons not QM reasons.

Re:Determinism?

[lgw]

Well, we have to be careful with the English terminology. There are two effects here. One is, in a very intuitive way, when we measure something we affect it because of how we do the measurement. Find the position of an electron by slamming a photon into it, and obviously you've changed the system, wave function and all. This is not a fundamental limitation of physics, as it turns out, just a very difficult experimental problem.

Separately, when we measure the position/momentum of an electron (or any other paired values), we can dial in some proportion of uncertainty for both, depending on how we measure. Whatever range of uncertainly is left isn't merely unmeasured but actually indeterminate. The difference is subtle, but in this sense the measurement doesn't change the wave function, it's just inherent in the mapping between the wave function and what we measure. The wave function has variables with the same degrees of freedom as position x momentum, but they each represent a composite of both.

Sane people suggest

[jewsdid911]

Sane people suggest that Hawking is a nutjob and a snake oil salesman that doesn't have anything to do with science. Seriously, his fame will last about ten minutes after his death. Stop talking about this idiot already. He's done enough damage as it is.

Re:Sane people suggest

[SpankiMonki]

You know, trolling around here is properly done with a degree of subtlety. Problem for you is one doesn't need to read past your handle without knowing you're a troll.

Re:Sane people suggest

[Viol8]

He's an idiot is he? Oh ok then, if you say so. You'll be able to point us to some papers you've written disproving some of his theories then won't you Mr Genius.

Re:Sane people suggest

[Penguinisto]

Okay, idiot parent troll/spite/whatever aside, there is a small kernel of something that did strike my mind.

Hawking was once incredibly brilliant, in spite of the massive debilitation from ALS, a normally fatal disease that he's (so far) outlived by at least a factor or four.

That said, insofar as his brilliance, I think that time has sadly passed, or has slipped enough that seriously, unless there's solid math or observation backing it up, maybe the press should stop breathlessly reporting everything he says.

Like in this case, for instance. Where is the math for it? Seriously?

Re:Sane people suggest

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you for that incisive and detailed rebuttal, Professor... ?

Re:Sane people suggest

[bondsbw]

For Hawking, it's worth listening to his intuition even if he doesn't yet back it with science. It's not like he's some quack that has never made a solid discovery. Maybe he or someone else will take his ideas and put forth the work to reconcile them.

I agree that the press should never report his ideas as fact or even probable until there is an adequate basis for that claim. For now this needs to be classified as musings of Hawking, and that's all.

Re:Sane people suggest

[tinkerton]

Agreed. Intuition is a valid part of scientific endeavour, though not many will agree on that. There should be a lot of freedom in how one constructs a hypothesis. It's still a guess. If it's completely grounded in experiment then it's not a guess.

Re:Sane people suggest

[MightyMartian]

The guy's account is called "jewsdid911". I'm thinking you don't want to see the kinds of papers he writes.

Re:Sane people suggest

[Anonymous Coward]

Waffle != Senility

Maybe his younger position is closer to "the truth," maybe not. He probably deserves serious consideration from the community regarding this new, conflicting, idea that may successfully incorporate a couple of decades of additional input that wasn't available when the previous position was formulated. I have more respect for an older scientist who can contradict his previous positions that I do one who defends their original claims to fame until death.

Put another way: Einstein got lucky. Don't expect every brilliant insight to stand as truth forever.

Re:Sane people suggest

[Anonymous Coward]

There are more items on which hawkings is wrong, so lets just say it's a physicist with a lot of imagination...

Re:Sane people suggest

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you really think you'd understand the math? If he intuits something, I'm pretty sure he can
back it up with some math supporting(not proving) it that is so far beyond both you and I that
it isn't helpful to publish to the general public. I'd rather hear the intuition.

Re:Sane people suggest

[Hognoxious]

If it wasn't them, who was it?

Re:Sane people suggest

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm thinking you don't want to see the kinds of papers he writes.

Can't even use them when you run out of toilet paper, they're already full of shit.

Re:Sane people suggest

[Rei]

It's not "waffling", Slashdot's lack of understanding of cosmology notwithstanding.

What Hawking said in 2014 was that black holes - in the context of disjoint regions of space irrevocably disconnected from our spacetime - do not exist.
What Hawking is said now is... the same thing.

Hawking did waffle on black holes, once; he was once of the view that information was lost irretrievably beyond the event horizon, but he conceded based on a large scientific debate that arose that this view was mistaken. While he's certainly refined the details of the mechanism and consequences since then (as have the many other cosmologists working on the problem), his overall view has not changed.

A big area of debate which caused the "refining" was the so-called "firewall" paradox, which pointed out a variety of fundamental problems that come when you try to reconcile an effectively disjoint region of spacetime with the concept of information leaking out. The resolutions have been increasingly that black holes aren't nearly as disjoint as they first appeared to be.

Honestly, with the way things are headed, I wouldn't be surprised if what we end up with is nothing more than a dilationary inflation gravity near the event horizon that leads to infalling matter being bent into a flat spacetime at the event horizon - not just a case of "no event horizon", but no singularity either. I've seen some work on this in the past, and it really would make a lot of the "weirdness" of the universe (from black holes to the Big Bang) become a lot less weird. The unification of black holes, inflation and the Big Bang leads to what I find to be a very satisfying "fate of the universe" scenario... the universe "bangs", black holes ultimately form, they drift unthinkably far apart over unfathomably long timespans, then they in turn bang in the exact same manner, creating new universes of their own. And contrary to how it may at first seem (that each new universe would be a small fraction the size of its parent), this wouldn't inherently be the case, as we also have dark energy in the picture.

But that's just my take :)

(Flat spacetime isn't really that weird... we live in spacetime that is, on the large scale, flat)

Re:Sane people suggest

[flopsquad]

Well I'll be damned, I had no idea Jews did 911.

**Thank you, people of the Jewsish faith, for giving the Unites States its emergency services telephone number! It is much easier to use than having to know the number for the local police department everywhere you go!!**

Mod jewsdid911 +1 Informative, pls.

Re:Sane people suggest

[rochrist]

You, of all people, calling Stephen Hawking an idiot is deeply ironic.

Re:Sane people suggest

[Anonymous Coward]

perhaps he could pass the work on to Sheldon cooper and string him along

Re:Sane people suggest

[hey!]

And speculation != waffling, so we're at least twice removed from direct evidence of Hawking's supposed senility.

In any case what sets Hawking apart isn't infallibility; it's creativity. If you want to be a creative genius you can't worry too much about being wrong, any more than you can be a chess master and worry too much about losing material. It's part of the game.

Re:Sane people suggest

[MightyMartian]

Maybe it was you.

Re:Sane people suggest

[MightyMartian]

Read the guy's posts. He blames Jews for pornography.

Re:Sane people suggest

[suupaabaka]

Science isn't about being right all the time...

Re:Sane people suggest

[Anonymous Coward]

Stephen's a bit of a dope. But why should TRUMP have all the fun?

Re:Sane people suggest

[Anonymous Coward]

Do I know you? Why are you talking as if we knew each other?

Re:Sane people suggest

[flopsquad]

Dear Autocorrect:

You insist that when I type '>' I really meant to abbreviate Sergeant, and you will go to your grave convinced that 'href' is just me fucking up 'heed' multiple times every day. But when I type 'Jewsish,' you're like, "Shit yeah man looks right to me!"

Get your shit together.

Love,
-floppy

Re:Sane people suggest

[Anonymous Coward]

Bollocks! Intuition is destroying real science. You should abolish intuition, creativity, invention and discovery.

Re:Sane people suggest

[Anonymous Coward]

Where is the math for it? Seriously?

Maybe it hasn't occurred to you that a world-leading expert on physics who can't so much as hold a pen can do a lot of maths inside his own head.

It's writing it down that he has problems with.

So maybe he's allowed to announce some tentative results or ideas without proving them in detail for idiots on Slashdot who wouldn't even understand what it said anyway.

Re:Sane people suggest

[david_thornley]

Einstein had strong intuitions. When they were correct, we got relativity. When they weren't, we got new insights into quantum theory by figuring out why he was wrong.

All the Hollywood Glitz has gone to his head!

[Big Hairy Ian]

No sorry it's just drool. Somebody wipe his chin please

Not quite logical

[slashmydots]

If the mass completely leaves the universe for another universe, why would the gravity be left behind? Also we still can't retrieve the information about the matter that entered without leaving this universe. Also, black holes from other universes should perhaps then spew random massive particles into our universe somewhere and we wouldn't be able to use its vector to determine where it came from AND it would start interacting with matter in our universe which would mess with the back-tracking of information on movement. So much for information preservation.

Re: Not quite logical

[Anonymous Coward]

Huh, wouldn't the black hole itself constitute a massive particle?

Re:Not quite logical

[Viol8]

"If the mass completely leaves the universe for another universe, why would the gravity be left behind?"

I wondered something similar when they kept saying the singularity in a black hole has zero size. Well something with no dimentions doesn't exist so how can it still have a gravitational field? Unless because time is so slowed inside a black hole relative to outside that from an outside observers point of view the singularity essentially never forms.

Re:Not quite logical

[Anonymous Coward]

If the mass completely leaves the universe for another universe, why would the gravity be left behind?

Wouldn't gravity be a localised phenomenon?

Re: Not quite logical

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe, and certainly the massive amounts of gravity could alter the wavelengths of anything falling into it. In that case I think they reach a wave length BECAUSE they fall into the black hole, not the other way around.

But let's not forget that Einstein suggested that Time may not even exist. It may be simply that were perceive time, all because we have gravity and motion. If that is the case then the universe is more like a CD of music. All the songs and notes are there in a static state, and we only perceive the time in listening to it because the laser and disk move in relation to each other.

Re:Not quite logical

[Anonymous Coward]

I am not an astrophysicist but i thought the reason a black hole would still have mass and gravitation is that not only is the mass compressed to a geometric point but the resulting gravitation that causes time to appear to effectively stop also compresses the space that contains it.

Basically that if you could be an observer within the geometric point the amount of space within that point would be near infinite and the surrounding space outside that point would be unobservable.

Re: Not quite logical

[MightyMartian]

I thought the fully deterministic universe wasn't all that popular these days, particularly with QM mucking things up, particularly at the earliest moments after the Big Bang, when quantum effects dwarfed gravity.

Re:Not quite logical

[BarbaraHudson]

I am not an astrophysicist but i thought the reason a black hole would still have mass and gravitation is that not only is the mass compressed to a geometric point but the resulting gravitation that causes time to appear to effectively stop also compresses the space that contains it.

Basically that if you could be an observer within the geometric point the amount of space within that point would be near infinite and the surrounding space outside that point would be unobservable.

Sounds like our universe to me. It's a lot better than that BS "we may be a simulation" that was floated here a few days ago.

Re:Not quite logical

[Maritz]

Also we still can't retrieve the information about the matter that entered without leaving this universe.

This is exactly the stuff that Hawking was contradicted on by Juan Maldacena, Lenny Susskind and so on. You can get that information back out, you just have to wait for the black hole to dissolve. That won't happen much until the ambient temperature of the universe drops lower than that of the black hole, and even then it's slow. Something like ten to the hundred years for a stellar-sized black hole to disappear completely.

But what those guys demonstrated is that the hawking radiation carries the information about what went in. That's why Hawking conceded defeat.

Re:Not quite logical

[Anonymous Coward]

The universe IS a computer. I know this because we can build our own computer out of it. Now it is more then just a computer, but it is still one.

And yes, fuck the corrupt hypocrite LGBT cult. LGBTPZN community is more inclusive of ALL sexual deviants.

Re:Not quite logical

[caffiend2049]

Perhaps the black hole is a universe unto itself. Matter captured thereby could be expressed as spacetime to the "included universe" and explain inflation and other changes to expansion. Tiny bits of contraction could relate to long periods of radiation into the external universe.....only to return to expanding when matter accretes into the blackhole from the "parent" dimension?

Re:Not quite logical

[sexconker]

In before Neil The Quack Tyson announces that our universe is a simulation run inside a black hole in a larger, parent universe. Every black hole in our parent universe is an instance server for another simulation. Every black hole in our universe is an instance server for a simulation one level below us. We didn't build them, so aliens must have, thus aliens exist and are simulating universes. We can then conclude that it's most probably true that the people running our universe's simulation are also aliens and thus it is most probably true that we are not the focus of the simulation. The aliens running the other simulations in our universe are the focus, thus nothing we do matters. Ultimately, nothing we do matters, so we can all forget about how bad remake of Cosmos was.

Re:Not quite logical

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like our universe to me. It's a lot better than that BS "we may be a simulation" that was floated here a few days ago.

Pardon, but from a logical point of view, the Simulation Hypothesis is absolutely flawless. Hence the discomfort we feel when we contemplate it.

Re:Not quite logical

[Anonymous Coward]

In before

Too late. You being an ass is already well established.

Re:Not quite logical

[tnk1]

Calling the Universe a simulation is pointless. It certainly could be, but the simple fact that it shares some characteristics of what we would call a "simulation" doesn't make it a "simulated universe".

That's like saying, "I think quantization is messy, so I am going to assume there is a Universe that doesn't have it because that would be less fake, or something".

We have no frame of reference outside of the Universe. Everything else is mere speculation and completely unscientific. Assuming that the Universe is a simulation because it is quantized is just making shit up. How could you possibly falsify such a theory?

Kind of an odd point for NdGT to make. You might as well believe in God, because you don't get a simulation without someone running one, and both concepts are at about the same level of scientific inquiry.

Anyway, I think the simulation idea is interesting, but in scientific terms it's wankery.

Re:Not quite logical

[BarbaraHudson]

I think his theory has too many holes to take it seriously :-)

Re:Not quite logical

[BarbaraHudson]

So are a lot of paranoid delusions. Internally completely self-consistent. Doesn't make them true.

Even he would have to agree, his theory is full of holes. He just claims that the holes in his theory are features. :-) Try the fish.

Re:Not quite logical

[Anonymous Coward]

You might as well believe in God, because you don't get a simulation without someone running one

No need to believe in God. The entities running the simulation are not deemed [refer to Nick Bostrom] to be Omniscient, Almighty, Perpetual or Infinite. They are Simulators. And they are running the Ancestor Simulation [that's what the Simulation Hypothesis is about] exactly because they want to know how their world got to the point they perceive it to be. The simulation [or even nested simulations] stops at one point in some physical world.

Re:Not quite logical

[tnk1]

Of course, I didn't say you *need* to believe in God, but that if we're going to go off the rails like this, you *might as well*.

Honestly, someone who can program an entire universe is a better candidate for the whole God thing than some whitebeard in the sky, anyway. As for the more extreme characteristics of such a being, I agree that the possibilities are endless and include limited beings, but they could also include an Omniscient, Almighty, Perpetual and/or Infinite Being too.

In any event, it's this sort of thing that annoys me about scientists. When they talk about science, they clearly know what they're talking about. When they go off the rails and start pronouncing about everything, from the economy to religion, and are considered to be authoritative there, I start getting annoyed. Nothing like making shit up to counter the stuff you think is made up.

Re:Not quite logical

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't complain about his theories being mathematically unsound then spout this nonsense and expect to be taken seriously, surely?
It like some 8 year old saying "Some other things aren't true so this might not be too."
Just because you don't like the theory doesn't make it wrong, if you can argue that it is illogical then fine.
I'll doubt you can refute the logic though.

Re:Not quite logical

[BarbaraHudson]

You miss the point - internal consistency is not a valid criteria. There are plenty of novels and sci-fi stories that are internally consistent, but false. There are plenty of stories that are posted, both here and elsewhere, where internal consistency doesn't make it true. It is pure speculation. Until it's proven, I'm going to say "horse sh*t".

Re: Not quite logical

[Anonymous Coward]

Determinism is the foundation on which science rests on. The model that doesn't support determinism is no better than "God works in mysterious ways."

Re:Not quite logical

[Anonymous Coward]

Pardon, but from a logical point of view, the Simulation Hypothesis is absolutely flawless. Hence the discomfort we feel when we contemplate it.

No, the simulation hypothesis is just as pointless as any other religion.

It will require at least on particle to simulate that particle perfectly. That means that any system capable of simulation this universe will be so vastly different from this reality that it will be incomprehensible.
The difference between the outer universe and this universe will be as different as this universe and any simulation we are running.

We don't need to contemplate it at all, it is just another variant of "God is omnipotent and works in mysterious ways."
In fact, if you prove this to be a simulation you have actually found God and religion will finally have found a place.

Re:Not quite logical

[Anonymous Coward]

One can know if we are in a simulation. You just have to look "inside" yourself. It's not provable with physical tools because physical tools are part of the simulation. This path steps into the realm of Spiritual Enlightenment.

You must drop your identification with the ego. You are not the voice in your head, or the thoughts you appear to have. You are not your body. You are all of which is aware of all of these things.

Once you drop all identification, you can then see if we are in a simulation or not. Directly, for yourself. And, once you have the answer, you can share it with no-one who doesn't see it, because they're still identified as the simulation.

In a dream at night in bed, once you become lucid and aware that you are dreaming, that is, creating the entirety of the reality that you are experiencing, it's pointless to run up to the other dream characters and tell them that this is a dream, as they are part of the dream.

Same problem here, and with that said; this entire post is pointless.

Re:Not quite logical

[Wargames]

Wake up! You're dreaming!!!

Re:Not quite logical

[Anonymous Coward]

All science starts as speculation and some actual science was speculated for centuries before being provable. Some even speculated that some ideas were impossible to prove, leaving them in the realm of Philosophy, until someone figured out a way to test, then centuries later, someone figured out a way to create the test. Welcome to science, where everything starts as Philosophy.

Re: Not quite logical

[MightyMartian]

I think you're mixing up what is meant by determinism. Quantum effects do not appear to be deterministic, in that individual events have some degree of randomness or unpredictability, but QM is probabilistic in that the sum of all quantum events will tend in one direction or another (i.e. the history of a single photon cannot be known with complete certainty, but the paths of a beam of light made up of billions or trillions of photons can be predicted).

In this regard, while the laws that influenced the Early Universe certainly are testable, because quantum effects played such a huge role when the universe was too hot and dense for gravity to play a major part, the fundamental nature of quantum interactions means the universe could have turned out differently than it did, without violating any notion of the determinism of physical principles.

Re:Not quite logical

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly.

Re:Not quite logical

[Mass Overkiller]

+1 Also, isn't the black hole a point because the math doesn't work quite right? I mean a singularity is basically infinity and in math an infinity is caused by math that is not quite right or accurate enough.

Re:Not quite logical

[Anonymous Coward]

If you zoom out to infinity, you will see that the entire universe is relatively flat, like a piece of paper.
There is nothing above or below it. Just more empty space. There is nowhere to go.

Re:Not quite logical

[Anonymous Coward]

The idea that I had read before was that the new universe is inside the black hole. Not sure if that is consistent with these ideas from Lee Smolin:

The idea is that the universe evolved in a way which is very analogous to natural selection in a population, say, of bacteria. To do this the universe needs to reproduce itself, and I took over an older idea by John Wheeler and Bryce DeWitt, who were pioneers of quantum gravity. Their idea was that black holes become the seeds of the birth of new universes. [5 Reasons We May Live in a Multiverse]

John Wheeler had already speculated that when this happens, the laws of nature are reborn again, in the new baby universe; he called it reprocessing the universe. What I had to add to this to make it work like a model of natural selection, was that the changes passed form parent to child universe are very slight so there can be an accumulation of fitness. This hypothesis leads to the conclusion that assuming our universe is a typical member of this population of universes as it develops after many, many generations, that the universe is going to be finely tuned to produce many black holes. That leads to the next hypotheses that if you change the laws, and the numbers that specify the laws, then typically you're going to make a universe that makes less black holes, and that's something that leads to predictions that can be tested.

That's the theory that I call cosmological natural selection.

Re:Not quite logical

[RivenAleem]

The Doppler shift of the universe shows us that the extremities are accelerating away faster than tings at the core. If the universe was contained in a black hole, then everything would be doppler shifted in reverse, with everything accelerating towards the centre.

Re:Not quite logical

[freax]

Well, our universe expands. Perhaps particles are being added somewhere at its edges, and to make room for the new guys we get universe-wide expansion in return. Which would or could mean that we are inside a black hole (or, that our universe is a black hole) and particles, stars and planets are swirling around it and getting sucked in from time to time.

But I don't know. I am not an astrophysicist.

Re:Not quite logical

[slashmydots]

I always pictured a singularity as "large enough to exist but infinitely small otherwise" and left it at that. It makes sense because there's a popular theory that a black hole can spin faster than the speed of light because it has no measurable radius but does have "a" radius. Of course I completely made that infinitely small part up on my own and have no idea if anyone else also thinks that. Then people are saying it's like 1.000001x the width of a neutron or quark or something. That sounds outdated and wrong by now though. Then people said it has the radius of the plank length, which sort of makes sense. I think it could have just transcended the first 3 dimensions and is so far into another dimension that it no longer has width or length. That makes the most sense.

Re:Not quite logical

[david_thornley]

Heck, old science was often consistent, but lacked explanatory power. Phlogiston was, as far as I can remember, a consistent theory and explained observations - until people made more observations.

Re:Not quite logical

[david_thornley]

Usually a singularity is a point where the mathematical description breaks down. It doesn't have to be. The function f(x) = 1/x has a singularity at x = 0, in that the value goes to infinity and the function is discontinuous there. That is correct and accurate math. There's also the fact that physics doesn't have to behave in a way such that the math is convenient. If there's a physical singularity, there's a physical singularity, regardless of what we think about the math.

Re:Not quite logical

[BarbaraHudson]

We simply don't know what happens in a black hole.

Re:Not quite logical

[BarbaraHudson]

Yep. Even the aether is making a sort of comeback as a "universal substrate".

Re:Not quite logical

[bill_mcgonigle]

Assuming that the Universe is a simulation because it is quantized is just making shit up. How could you possibly falsify such a theory?

We build models about how it could work, see what predictions the model makes, and look for things that look like that for evidence. For instance, the noise between 10^-27 and h from the Polish gravity wave experiment and the Fermilab model. If the noise weren't there, that model would have been falsified.

All we ever have are theories. We test them, and if their predictions are false, then we discard them and move on, leaving standing the ones that haven't yet been falsified.

Re:Not quite logical

[RivenAleem]

I get that, but given how everything accelerates towards a black hole, with things further away accelerating slower, then it is not unreasonable to assume that it continues behind the event horizon, given that the event horizon is only the point at which light cannot escape, and not as such a physical barrier. Beyond the event horizon, everything is still accelerating, but even faster than outside it, until...

However, if things are still accelerating thus they are breaking the lightspeed barrier and all bets are off.

Re:Not quite logical

[BarbaraHudson]

Actually, it's unreasonable to make any assumptions of what's going on in a black hole at this point. We just don't know.

Stealing from Disney....

[martiniturbide]

I knew I hear this idea before :) It is like we need a reboot of it with an overhauled V.I.N.CENT. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:Stealing from Disney....

[Sloppy]

I haven't seen that movie since I was a little kid (and I liked it!), and now I'm afraid to (because I probably won't like it). Dare I?

Re:Stealing from Disney....

[rfengr]

Ditto. Re-watched it after 36 years with my 6 YO recently, and he liked it. It was OK. The only thing I remembered as a kid was Maximillian killing the guy with the saw blade; not as dramatic the second time around.

Re:Stealing from Disney....

[martiniturbide]

Look this reference from Wikipedia "In 2014, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson deemed the film to be the least scientifically accurate movie of all time." Neil knows about physics but not about sales... a new movie reboot has potential :)

Re:Stealing from Disney....

[Lije Baley]

I'm no stranger to science, but this is still one of my favorite movies. I suppose that I tend to watch movies with the eye of a child and not that of a critic though.

Re: Stealing from Disney....

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.redbubble.com/people/hamfondler/works/20151460-dj-max-in-the-house-dark?p=t-shirt

Re:Stealing from Disney....

[Dahamma]

Sounds like a rap battle between NgDT and MC Hawking is about to go down!

Sphere of Annihilation

[Infiniti2000]

Going through a black hole will destroy you, much like a sphere of annihilation. This article reminds me of one of my favorite D&D stories. As relayed by another DM of a group of relatively inexperienced (new) players, they had encountered a sphere of annihilation. One player touched it and promptly vaporized into nothingness. One of the remaining party members said, "Oh, it must be a portal! Quick, everyone, jump in!" Four more pops later and the DM had to decide between a TPK or a new adventure in some otherworldly plane.

Re:Sphere of Annihilation

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

>> TPK or a new adventure in some otherworldly plane

Always a good time to introduce the Dark Sun campaign, IMHO. That's always played like an outer ring of hell.

Re:Sphere of Annihilation

[Infiniti2000]

Yeah, honestly I don't know what he decided to do. But, either Dark Sun or Hollow World are good choices if he went that route.

Spiraling galaxies

[Anonymous Coward]

I was vacuuming some drywall dust out of the air the other day and noticed that as the airborne dust approached the vaccuum host, the air started swirling.
I imagined the dust particles as stars, and the vacuum as a massive black hole. I wonder if all the galaxies are spiraling due to some supermassive, as-yet-undetected gravitational force.

Re: Spiraling galaxies

[Bruha]

It's called drag. Gravity of the black hole pulls on the nearest matter and that matter pulls on the matter nearest to it. If black holes are moving dark matter as well then that's all the mass you need to move the rest of a galaxy.

Re:Spiraling galaxies

[l0n3s0m3phr34k]

You mean something like this?

Re:Spiraling galaxies

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, exactly. Thanks!

I-call-it-a-Hawking-Hole.

[Anonymous Coward]

Put-him-in-the-chamber. It-was-my-idea.

least plausible

[ooloorie]

"Portals to another universe" sounds like the least plausible model of black holes. More plausible are non-singular models in which the matter simply transitions into another state inside the black hole; examples are the gravastar and the dark energy star; there are many other possibilities.

It also seems odd to me that people would cling to the "information paradox" as if there were some good reason to believe it. If you truly believe that there is a singularity at the center of a black hole, why wouldn't you also believe that it can destroy information? Conversely, if you try to preserve information in a black hole, it seems to me that you are effectively already modeling an object other than a singularity.

Re:least plausible

[Anonymous Coward]

From your gravastar source:

Mazur and Mottola suggest that the violent creation of a gravastar might be an explanation for the origin of our universe and many other universes, because all the matter from a collapsing star would implode "through" the central hole and explode into a new dimension and expand forever, which would be consistent with the current theories regarding the Big Bang.

How is that different from the implications of the summary of the article written by someone who wasn't in the class and heard someone talking about it?
Since neither the summary nor article links in any way to the actual lecture involved, I find it entirely believable that Steve was describing some of the models that all work equally well against current observations and briefly mentioning the consequences of each.

Re:least plausible

[ooloorie]

How is that different from the implications of the summary of the article written by someone who wasn't in the class and heard someone talking about it?

I have no idea how it is different, not having attended the lecture. I just thought it was worth pointing out that other people have thought about these issues before and come up with various explanations. As for Mazur and Mottola's gravastars, it's possible that Hawking's lecture referred to their model and the summary just misattributed it to Hawking and then described it poorly.

Re:least plausible

[painandgreed]

It also seems odd to me that people would cling to the "information paradox" as if there were some good reason to believe it. If you truly believe that there is a singularity at the center of a black hole, why wouldn't you also believe that it can destroy information? Conversely, if you try to preserve information in a black hole, it seems to me that you are effectively already modeling an object other than a singularity.

Well, the reason they don't like information being destroyed is because of this thing called the Second Law of Thermodynamics. If that information is being destroyed, then the Second Law of Thermodynamics is false, and then we've got to readdress all of physics as one of the foundation premises is wrong. Unless, of course, the black hole goes to another universe, then we are not in a closed system and all is good once again. However, keep in mind that any time that physicist like Hawking say things like "information", "entropy", or "universe" it is probably being simplified several steps from what they really mean which is represented by mathematical equations involving English and Greek letters, very few numbers, and often symbols you wouldn't recognize without some graduate physics courses in tensor calculus. Anytime you read something like this, you are really getting the physics explaination you can understand like when a computer tech explains to the secretary that her computer doesn't work any more because the magic smoke got out. As a car analogy, your questions about destroying information are like interjecting into a conversation of car mechanics speaking of torque, rpms, and horsepower about why you can't just make the car go faster by carving a hole out of the floor of the car so you can push the pedal down farther.

Re:least plausible

[Anonymous Coward]

Correct me if I'm wrong - it's been a few decades since I studied physics - but isn't the second law of thermodynamics a derived property? ie you take the laws of physics like general relativity, quantum mechanics, the standard model etc, mix in some common-sense approximations and a few assumptions (eg the universe started in an ordered state), marinate in a whole lot of complicated maths and out pops the laws of thermodynamics, information etc?

If this is correct (and as best as I can recall it is) then it does seem odd, at least to me, to hold up things like entropy and the information paradox in black holes as somehow more fundamental than the laws from which said properties were derived. Surely a more reasonable approach is to say that this is simply an exception to an almost universal rule due to the presence of a singularity/event horizon/similar extreme event we don't have very much experience with and hence intuitive feel for?

Re:least plausible

[ooloorie]

Yes, you're right that this is linked to the second law of thermodynamics. But in thermodynamics, this law is actually an axiom based on the kinds of macroscopic systems people have observed. And in statistical mechanics, it is a subtle statistical statement about large systems and their evolution over time, concepts that break down for black holes. Finally, invalidating a physical "law" under some extreme conditions usually has little effect on existing physics; we still teach and use classical mechanics despite the existence of quantum theory and general relativity. So nothing bad would happen to most of physics if this were invalidated for black holes.

Don't let all the Greek letters intimidate you; knowing them is useful for calculations and arguments, but they are a poor second to actual understanding. Einstein worked out the theory of relativity before he put it into formulas, and many mathematical proofs are also first worked out before being put into formulas.

Re:least plausible

[Anonymous Coward]

Information can't be destroyed. You're thinking of time as "something used to exist, but no longer exists". This is not how the Universe works. Time is just another dimension and destroying information completely removes it from all of the time dimension. Information that "no longer exists", never existed in the first place. You've changed the past without affecting your present. That makes no sense.

The reason for this is physics runs forwards and backwards perfectly symmetrically. If you lose information, you can't run backwards anymore. Our concept of time is tainted by our perception. We assume time runs forward, when it does not. It's just another dimension.

Re:least plausible

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason for this is physics runs forwards and backwards perfectly symmetrically.

Well, no

This is not how the Universe works

We don't know how the universe works. We don't know whether information is created or destroyed, or whether time reversibility is true at some level, or any of these other issues. If we did, people wouldn't be coming up with new theories about what black holes are.

Re:least plausible

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for the link +1

I just want to mention one thing and why I felt confident about the scientific community's general stance on time symmetry. I watched several 1hr+ interviews with many many of the leading physicists from quantum, to string, to multi-verse. The video's were presented from Universities like Cambridge and other recognized national or world events. In every single one of the video interviews, this question came up about time, and every single time every physicist, regardless of their stance of all other things, all said Information cannot be destroyed. One person even called it the negative 1st law of physics because it is the most important law of all. They all explained that knowing all information now can tell us exactly what has happened in all of time.

With so many well recognized institution's leading physicists disagreeing on so many other ideas, but they all agreed on this one, it seemed pretty important.

They did explain that it is possible for information to be destroyed from our perspective, but as long as the Universe/Multiverse/whatever knows about the information, all is well. Just because we can't access the information, doesn't mean it's gone.

Black Holes Cannot Grow?

[Anonymous Coward]

So if a black hole sucks in a star, the mass of the black hole remains the same? Is that what this is saying?

If so, then I can see the paradox. If not, then I'm afraid I don't get it. To attempt a car analogy about a subject I can barely grasp, wouldn't that be like saying "we crushed this car beyond recognition. Since we can no longer determine the make and model of this car, information has been lost! Paradox!"?

Re:Black Holes Cannot Grow?

[tnk1]

No, the mass of a black hole does grow. The mass of black holes can be measured.

There are three things (and only three things) you can measure about a singularity inside a black hole: its mass, its charge, and its angular momentum. Obviously, for the black hole itself, you can measure the area of the event horizon as well, but the event horizon is not actually the singularity, but a border between where light can escape, and where it cannot. The event horizon's area and shape are defined by the singularity's mass (area of the event horizon) and the angular momentum (spinning singularities have "flattened" event horizons).

Now that may sound like a lot of things you can measure, but it is actually the most sparse data sets known to exist for an object. And considering all of the things that get sucked into a black hole, you lose a lot of information about the original infalling matter when it is reduced to that.

However, I thought that they had decided that the information was encoded into the event horizon as fluctuations, or was that just a theory?

Paradigm longevity

[Empiric]

"For more than 200 years, we have believed in the science of determinism..."

Our culture being steeped in Newtonian mechanics (where everything is fundamentally predictable) for a very long time has had a strong psychological influence, even after QM comes along to show that determinism itself is very questionable as a principle.

Supervenience is a trickier question than most realize, even top-flight physicists.

Re:Paradigm longevity

[Anonymous Coward]

Or determinism shows QM to be incorrect and the faithful won't accept it because it means their lifes work is built on garbage.

That's the sad reality here. No time travelling photons, going backwards in time, changing their wave/particle nature, and the nature of every atom they interacted with, in order to be either particle or wave for the detector (which is just another interaction, only the scientist measuring something decides that that atom is a detector).

All just complete crap.

The basic two slit experiment. The light goes through both slits. The detector can only detect above the threshold needed to kick an outer electron from an atom. It sees pulses of light because that is all it can detect. The quantum of light is just the energy need to kick off the electron, but the light is there even when the detector can't detect it.

As you made more efficient detectors with lower energy thresholds, you turned the light source down till that new detector saw individual pulses, which you decided were packets aka photons. Then you feed the light through 2 slits, and stuck this new detector in front of the slit and expected it to see HALF of the lowest level it could detect!

All the theory built on this simple misunderstanding now a total joke.

Re:Paradigm longevity

[mbone]

"For more than 200 years, we have believed in the science of determinism..."

Our culture being steeped in Newtonian mechanics (where everything is fundamentally predictable) for a very long time has had a strong psychological influence, even after QM comes along to show that determinism itself is very questionable as a principle.

Supervenience is a trickier question than most realize, even top-flight physicists.

Hawking is arguing that, in order for quantum mechanics to work, a black hole has to be deterministic (albeit in a way that we could never possibly check).

Schrodinger's equation is deterministic (unitary). It's measurements that introduce uncertainty, oddly enough by making some things certain.

Re:Paradigm longevity

[TomGreenhaw]

...or the universe is deterministic but the exact mathematical model would need to take into account the state of every massive and charged particle in the entire universe. Because of this concept, a statistical tool like QM is a useful approximation. Approximations like QM may not be the whole exact truth, but they are extremely useful. Approximations such as Newton's laws were used by mankind to send Voyager probes outside the solar system.

Although there are crackpot physicists who point to weird results from fictional mathematical stories, credible physicists understand that a cat cannot be both alive and dead until observed.

Just a couple more points:
>No time travelling photons, going backwards in time
Yep - no time travel. Time emerges from all particles' massive and electric influence on space which we say travels at the speed of light. Fictions like Dirac's equations implying that antimatter travels back in time are consequences of flawed equations that even Dirac knew did not accurately represent the true nature of reality.

>changing their wave/particle nature
Particles are waves. Credible physicists understand this. Photons are quantized because they are created by the motion of electrons whose orbitals have fixed dimensions dictated by the electric influence of the atom's nucleus. Einstein said as much when he explained the photoelectric effect by showing the quantum nature of the photon. Particle/Wave duality is a common semantic misunderstanding spread by people who have difficulty explaining and understanding this concept.

>All the theory built on this simple misunderstanding now a total joke.
I agree that there are a bunch of crazy ideas in physics (don't get me started on dark matter), but I can't agree that quantum mechanics is a total joke.

Re:Paradigm longevity

[Anonymous Coward]

Time emerges from all particles' massive and electric influence on space?
I rather stop there....

Re:Paradigm longevity

[Anonymous Coward]

Newtonian determinism, the clockwork universe, crashed after the N-body problems and chaos became along. Emergent properties of systems support the validity of coarse graining in science and so fighting the too strict and narrow application of supervenience. Models in various levels have mathematical properties that crosscut all similar models.

Re:Paradigm longevity

[Anonymous Coward]

Theoretically, Newtonian determinism still works even in a chaotic systems provided you know the state of the system to infinite accuracy.

Re:Paradigm longevity

[david_thornley]

The Universe doesn't have to be deterministic for science to work. That you are so convinced of determinism is a psychology problem, not a physics problem, because the experimental evidence is that the Universe isn't deterministic at a quantum scale, meaning that the evidence is thoroughly against you and you're almost certainly wrong.

Re:Paradigm longevity

[Anonymous Coward]

General consensus is that the Universe isn't deterministic at the quantum scale because you're only looking at one part of the Universe and ignoring all other influences. Outside influences add noise and make things more "random". What you have is an ocean of waves all interacting with each other making it impossible to completely isolate one wave from the rest. If you had a perfect snapshot of all information, you could determine everything, but nothing inside the Universe can do such a thing.

Let's find out!

[Anonymous Coward]

Phase 1. Build the Rocinante
Phase 2. ?
Phase 3. Profit

and the proposal for testing it is?

[4wdloop]

One can possibly fit many (infinite) mathematical models here, no? So I am dubious if this ever gets resolved.

Re:and the proposal for testing it is?

[gtall]

Actually, new mathematical models create black holes sucking in all manner of discourse and reasoning. What fails to flow out of them are particles of Enlightenment. That's what make them so devious.

Now build a stargate to be able to safly use it

[Joe_Dragon]

Now build a stargate to be able to safely use it!

Re:Now build a stargate to be able to safly use it

[the_Bionic_lemming]

The only thing stargates and black holes had in common was they made quite effective weapons. Course the learning curve to use it almost cost us the Earth....

Consoling a friend?

[Gravis Zero]

Fry> Don't cry Bender. Nobody really knows what happens in a black hole. It's possible she's still alive in another dimension somewhere. Right, Professor?
Professor> Oh why yes, absolutely!
*Professor turns to Zoidberg*
Professor> Not a chance.
*Professor mimes being hanged*

Re:Consoling a friend?

[Reaper9889]

I think both are right, really. We do NOT know what goes on in a black hole. We DO know that you will get ripped to shreds before you get inside, though.

Re:Consoling a friend?

[Anonymous Coward]

#blackholesmatter

Re:Consoling a friend?

[wonkey_monkey]

We DO know that you will get ripped to shreds before you get inside, though.

If the black hole is big enough you can cross the event horizon without feeling so much as a pinch.

Re:Consoling a friend?

[azcoyote]

Haha, that quote is exactly what was going through my mind as I read this abstract, too.

The comment below by Reaper9889 is correct and thus highlights the fact that one could argue that the black hole goes to another universe but still kills whatever passes through. Nevertheless, this shows the silliness of the whole idea suggested now by Hawking. Any information that might be transferred to another universe would be essentially garbled beyond all recognition such that it would have only a nominal connection to this universe. A person goes in, and out in another universe comes some shadowy noise (of Hawking radiation?) that can never again be reassembled into a living person. On the other side, could we be sure that whatever "information" is really ever arriving from another universe? In fact, it is just as easy to conclude that whatever "arrives" is just random, meaningless noise with no basis in any universe whatsoever. Ockham's Razor would make such a multiverse assumption seem extremely improbable.

Perhaps the biggest problem, however, is that normal people read this kind of "news" and think that black holes are portals that might bring living people to other universes. Thankfully we don't have to worry about people throwing themselves into black holes any time soon, but people do turn this kind of gibberish into metanarratives of meaning--similar to how Bender is comforted by the thought that maybe she could still be alive in another universe. The thought of infinite other universes helps us to forget the pain and evils of this one. Example: "Maybe our little human civilization will be meaningful after all because some small little information about it will be able to reach another universe in some way and some other intelligent race will know that we once existed and that we were intelligent, after all." (Richard Dawkins says something similar to this in one of his books, but premised not on multiple universes but on the endless expanse of space.) "We maybe," I reply, "But maybe when that garbled, scratchy, noise that used to be information comes through to the other civilization, just maybe they won't give a damn. How meaningful will that be?"

Re:Consoling a friend?

[tnk1]

You're right, for a supermassive black hole, like the one at the center of our galaxy, the gravitational shear between what you experience at your head and your feet is basically like what you'd experience on the surface of Earth.

However, if you did manage to get far enough in, with all the oddness that implies, you would experience increasing shear as you approached the singularity. Eventually, it would become strong enough to rip you apart.

A "normal" stellar mass black hole would rip you apart almost immediately because the shear would be very high much less further in.

Either situation is probably academic, as you'd have been charbroiled long before you entered the event horizon by the X-rays and extremely hot matter in orbit which has been accelerated by the black hole to extreme velocities and energies.

Re:Consoling a friend?

[Anonymous Coward]

You might still be incinerated by the firewall so you go first and let us know what happens. :P

Re:Consoling a friend?

[Anonymous Coward]

A supermassive BH has no firewall. You might not even notice entering one of them. But once in, all routes takes you to the singularity, as in any other BH.

Firewalls are created by the massive G gradient of small-ish BH's.

Re:Consoling a friend?

[JohnStock]

You'd be vaporized as the energy levels and density due to friction near the event horizon is the most energetic energy levels in the universe. AKA Quasars

Re:Consoling a friend?

[Trogre]

Well, yes, but you don't just stop at the Event Horizon. That's just the boundary within which there is no theoretical escape even for light. A bigger black hole just means you get to wait a little longer before being ripped apart by tidal forces as you approach the singularity.

Re:Consoling a friend?

[Anonymous Coward]

From one's own perspective, you can never cross the event horizon. The event horizon is relative to the observer. Someone may observe that you've disappeared and "crossed over", but from your perspective, you're still far away.

Both observations can be correct as long as those two frames of reference can never come in contact again. That's the problem when talking about blackholes, You can't use absolute terms, only relative terms. From the perspective of the person that has fallen in, they can still escape the blackhole just fine and go on to explore the Universe. The problem they will have is since they got very close, the rest of the Universe has aged considerably and has moved away from them.

Re:Consoling a friend?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention that you would have to get to the center of the galaxy which 26,000 light years away, and you can't travel at the speed of light, and nobody has ever lived 200 years, let alone 26,000.

Um, My Mind Is More Of A Portal

[zenlessyank]

than some over magnetic particle shredder out in space. If nothing can escape the black hole then logic would suggest that you aren't going anywhere but to shreds even if you get close to it. Something that pulls things into it cannot very well send things out of it. There is but one universe and one reality. The wind blows the same whether you are on LSD or not. Your perception of the wind might change but it is still the same wind. I think Hawkings should stick to fucking with Sheldon.

Big bang = black hole goes boom

[Anonymous Coward]

Or, perhaps the cycle is: Black hole consumes everything around leaving nothing it till its too big. Then it goes boom, explodes forming a universe.
People in universe dream up lots of theories, in which they are the one and only universe.

1. Look, there won't be one universe, because anything that can create one universe can create N universes.
2. Thus black holes can't be the end game for matter.
3. You can't say "well the only reasons blackholes haven't eaten everything is because there hasn't been enough time since the start of the universe", because there has been plenty of universes and plenty of time. See 1).
4. So what might the end game for a blackhole look like, if you know that it *must* eject its matter with sufficient force to not simply suck it immediately back in again.
5. Doesn't 4) seem awfully like what a big bang would look like?
6. And doesn't the lack of matter not from this bang, look awfully like an area of space cleared by some universe sized black hole?
7. And if there were many universes pulling on ours, wouldn't you expect matter to be accelerating outwards?
8. And wouldn't you expect that matter to join other universes, the way galaxies collide into each other to form super galaxies?
9. So wouldn't you expect some universes to grow bigger as they suck in more matter.
10. Yet black holes can't be the end game, see 1.

Re:Big bang = black hole goes boom

[BarbaraHudson]

Look, there won't be one universe, because anything that can create one universe can create N universes.

Why? The act of creating the universe may render it impossible to create others.

Another Possible Reality

[FredK]

Since the escape velocity from a black hole "exceeds" the speed of light, particles arriving at the event horizon have a lot of energy. The energy from these particles is enough for the creation of another universe. The space inside a black hole expands (in a direction orthogonal to our space dimensions) forming the big bang starting that universe.

Re:Another Possible Reality

[wonkey_monkey]

The energy from these particles is enough for the creation of another universe.

Is it? How much is that in jiggawatts then?

Re:Another Possible Reality

[FredK]

If the particles were at the speed of light that would be infinity watts, whatever that means.

Re:Another Possible Reality

[wonkey_monkey]

It means they wouldn't reach the speed of light.

Re:Another Possible Reality

[FredK]

But doesn't it seem a little strange? The escape velocity is greater than the speed of light, but a particle falling in does not reach the speed of light (understandably). Maybe someone conversant in relativity can explain this.

Re:Another Possible Reality

[dadelbunts]

I imagine its something like terminal velocity. Terminal velocity for a human for example is like 180 mph or something, need a helluva lot more to get out tho.

Re:Another Possible Reality

[FredK]

Terminal velocity as you describe it is caused by drag. Drag has nothing to do with the escape velocity from a black hole.

Re:Another Possible Reality

[Anonymous Coward]

I've always wondered about this. If say some massive object got past the event horizon unmolested and was falling in toward the center of the black hole, wouldn't its own mass increase as it gains speed? You also wouldn't assume an object to fall forever or keep its same speed (eventually it would find the bottom of the gravity well id imagine) so its speed would eventually lower, lowering its mass. So you would think that a black hole would increase in mass when it eats something and then decrease slightly just after as the extra mass from the object's velocity decreases. Ofc this assumes the in-falling matter actually "falls" and isn't just converted to energy straight away.

Re:Another Possible Reality

[l0n3s0m3phr34k]

at least 1.21 jiggawatts...once you hit the speed of light sailing into a black hole, your going to see some serious shit.

Re:Another Possible Reality

[amRadioHed]

Mas can't move through space at the speed of light, however space-time itself can move faster than the speed of light and carry the mass with it. That's what happened during the big bang, and why distant galaxies can be observed receding from us faster than the speed of light.

Re:Another Possible Reality

[Anonymous Coward]

Gravity does not accelerate objects. Gravity is the warping of space-time. As far as an object cares, it is moving in a strait line with no forces acting upon it. The biggest issue is the gravitational gradient, so different objects have intersection "strait" lines, causing objects to collide. And no, an object will never find the bottom of the gravity well. The event horizon is always out of reach for an observer.

So you would think that a black hole would increase in mass when it eats something and then decrease slightly just after as the extra mass from the object's velocity decreases.

If you used a planet instead of a blackhole, when an objected reaches the surface, the energy would be converted into heat, sound, and other forms. For a blackhole, assuming the middle could be reached, you would just oscillate. A system cannot suddenly "lose" energy. It can only be transferred out of the system.

Re:Another Possible Reality

[Anonymous Coward]

Our Universe has a net energy of 0. It doesn't take any energy to create a Universe.

Just a lot of heavy elements

[Anonymous Coward]

I just wonder if they aren't super dense, extremely large planets basically. It is how a lot of the heavier elements we see in the universe got created. A lot of mass creates enough gravity to both capture light anything nearby, and has enough pull to hold together galaxies.

When they get too big, they explode and create the building blocks for newer galaxies.

Re:Just a lot of heavy elements

[tnk1]

Heavy elements are created by fusion inside of stars and also supernovae (which also frequently, but not always result in black holes). As far as I know, no black hole has ever exploded as nothing escapes from a black hole, and an explosion would seem to put the lie to that.

As far as creating a new universe from a singularity, we may never know. There is some speculation on that, but we're unlikely to ever be able to see that due to the impenetrability of the event horizon.

That said, our observations are that the Big Bang created mostly hydrogen, much less helium, and a trace of lithium. Heavy elements were not created in the Big Bang. We can see this with the Population II stars out there which are older and are metal-poor.

Maybe he just needs to stick to his music career.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.mchawking.com

Quantum theory is completely deterministic

[Anonymous Coward]

Quantum Theory is completely deterministic of the wave function. You might not be happy with that because it is not the familiar a state variables position and velocity. But Schrodinger solutions are very precise wave functions, as long as you can form a Hamiltonian.

Re:Quantum theory is completely deterministic

[Anonymous Coward]

Quantum Theory is completely deterministic of the wave function.

Yes, the probabilities are completely deterministic. They're still probabilities though.

here we go!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hawking really jumped the shark with this one. It seems like the things he says publicly are getting more and more wild in an attempt to maintain his relevance with the media.

Before you know it, black holes will be portals to the backsides of bookshelves.

It's official.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hawking is now senile.

Re:It's official.

[Anonymous Coward]

yet he's still more lucid than you.

Try Reading

[Anonymous Coward]

Lee Smolin's book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Nature abhors a vacuum and singularities

[idji]

I am sure that as we know more we will remove these singularities and find that black holes are actually "black smears", even if that smear has a radius of a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... and then maybe all the information is still there. Things maybe simpler than we hope.

Open your eyes.

[mbone]

Go outside. Open your eyes. You have just destroyed a host of quantum information - the quantum measurement process is not unitary.

Why are we more special than a black hole? Why should we assume that we can cause the wave function to collapse just by looking at the stars at night but that a blackhole cannot do so even when it eats a star whole?

I am with Penrose on this - it is simplest to assume that quantum systems will in fact no longer evolve unitarily under gravity, e.g.,, in black holes. Information will thus be lost - just as it is every time you use any of your senses.

Re:Open your eyes.

[l0n3s0m3phr34k]

all we are is dust in the cosmic wind; sailing into a black hole

Armchair Physicists Here

[Anonymous Coward]

system belonging to a particular time can be used to understand its state at a different time

Armchair physicist here, hello. Time and possibly dimensions breaks down in black holes so the determinism argument doesn't apply during the life time of the universe. Now, back to the game. Goooooaalllll!!!! Woah, the information of my celebratory scream almost spagettified.

I came here to make the same post.

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for doing it for me. :)

Portals to another universe

[mysidia]

claimed that black holes could be portals to a parallel universe.

Portal to a parallel universe in which you no longer exist, or time stops for you, forever; if you are foolish enough to fly into one.

Re:Portals to another universe

[fisted]

time stops for you, forever

*facepalm*

Blackhole mystisim

[WaffleMonster]

The so called information paradox is more likely to be a result of people fooling themselves than any strange happenings requiring exotic explanations involving other universes. An open box is always the low hanging explanation that conveniently explains away everything you don't understand.

Re:Blackhole mystisim

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed. Why doesn't Hawkin or his sycophants think about why the stars that quickly orbit the "super massive black hole" at the center of our galaxy do not display any "gravitational lensing". Hint: The electromotive force exists in space, and black holes are not required to explain such rotations about the galactic nexus.

Furthermore, astronomers and theoretical physicists alike love to ignore that light obeys simple optical properties in space, as it does here on land. For instance, diffraction (bending) due to light passing through a denser medium of (cold dark hydrogen) gas than the surrounding space will cause light to bend. So, light passing near an out-gassing galaxy would bend and blue-shift without the influence of gravity. And indeed, all "Einstein Rings" which are claimed to be caused by "gravitational lensing" are blue-shifted even though gravity is not supposed to cause any such color shifting.

Finally, it has been repeatedly observed that at least some red-shift is not caused by a difference in distance of the objects. This means the universe may not be expanding! This means the Big Bang may not be a viable explanation! If you point such observations out, you get drummed out of the field of astronomy. Astronomy is full of Zealots, and they are hindering science by wasting the very limited time that great minds like Hawkin have by censoring opposing evidence and refusing to question everything (as science requires).

Most astronomers to this day refuse to even examine the evidence for an electrically active stellar medium, and thus their assumed electrically neutral universe fails to factor in electro magnetism (which is far stronger than gravity).

TL;DR: Hawking has yet to disprove the Null Hypothesis, and Hawking Radiation has never been detected. There is contrary evidence to explain both the bending of light in space and galactic expansion. This means the Theory of Relativity and the Big Bang Theory may both be bogus, along with the "black holes", "dark energy", and "dark matter" that those theories predict and require.

Re:Blackhole mystisim

[MightyMartian]

Random guy on Internet claims physicists are wrong, misunderstands optics and doesn't seem to understand gravity lenses don't work when they are really close by and filled with fucking stars. But hey, he must be a fucking genius.

But of course, it's an electric universe advocate.

Re:Blackhole mystisim

[UnknownSoldier]

> Random guy on Internet claims physicists are wrong,

Riiiight, because you know more then Halton C. Arp, a professional astronomer who, earlier in his career, was Edwin Hubble's assistant, and that you've personally verified he made mistake in every object documented in his "Quasars, Redshifts and Controversies", right?

And you're published papers are where again?

Re:Blackhole mystisim

[MightyMartian]

Appeal to authority, to someone who has been dead for decades and was an astronomer, not a physicist.

But do go on showing what a lunatic you are. The scientific community has long moved past nonsense like the electric universe. It's just idiocy adopted by useless fucktards who are too lazy and too stupid, but so desperately want attention. You're a nobody, and you will forever be a nobody.

Re:Blackhole mystisim

[UnknownSoldier]

/sarcasm Obviously, we should listen to some random dude off the internet who claims an astronomer is wrong because clearly some random dude has years of experience, and published papers demonstrating that knowledge. Oh wait, he doesn't !

Gee, if only we had a name for a person pretending they know more then a credited and published scientist ... Oh wait we do.

An idiot.

> The scientific community has long moved past nonsense like the electric universe.

[[Citation]]

--
"Better to remain silent and thought a fool, then to speak and remove all doubt.

Re:Blackhole mystisim

[david_thornley]

In other words, you're using one astronomer as the basis for saying things about physics. In science, anyone can easily be wrong, and the only way to know it is to get a lot of different points of view and see where they coincide.

Re:Blackhole mystisim

[Anonymous Coward]

Why doesn't Hawkin or his sycophants think about why the stars that quickly orbit the "super massive black hole" at the center of our galaxy do not display any "gravitational lensing".

Because it's typically something you see very near the surface of a massive object or of an object far behind yet another object, like a galaxy hundreds of millions of light years behind another galaxy. "Why don't we get burned from the Sun if it's so hot? Hint: the Sun is really only 27c"

light passing through a denser medium of (cold dark hydrogen) gas than the surrounding space will cause light to bend

Not to mention absorb and scatter.

Finally, it has been repeatedly observed that at least some red-shift is not caused by a difference in distance of the objects.

Please explain how you can have a red-shift greater than the speed of light by several factors? You can't do that without breaking the speed of light. Please show me an experiment that allows for this to happen. Space expanding is less crazy than going faster than light through space.

electrically neutral universe fails to factor in electro magnetism (which is far stronger than gravity)

Electro-magnetism is a force, Gravity is not, it's only an emergent property of warping space-time. Why are we comparing forces and non-forces? They react completely differently. One accelerates objects, the other does not. You do realize that the photon is the carrier of the electro-magnetic force, right? And since photons do not experience time, an outside force cannot act upon them. How an "electric Universe" can affect photons is beyond me. Distortions of space-time and differences in frames of references can blue or red shift photons, nothing else.

The Singularity Inductor

[SMACX guy]

What actually transpires beneath the veil of an event horizon? Decent people shouldn't think too much about that.

-- Academician Prokhor Zakharov, "For I Have Tasted The Fruit"

Re:The Singularity Inductor

[l0n3s0m3phr34k]

"liberate tuteme ex inferis"

Hawking?

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean the increasingly decrepit, crumpled vegetable in the remote-controlled wheelchair? You guys do realize that one day, all the works attributed to him in the last 10 or maybe 15 years, are going to turn out to have been published as a practical joke pulled by a few guys no one pays any attention to, and who resent it, and one disgruntled college janitor, right? Suppose one is named Charles, and another Lem. This conversation could have already happened:

"Hey, Charles, how long do you think we can continue to convince the public and 'scientific community' that Steve is still, you know... 'in there'?"

"I dunno Lemmie, They bought 'A Short History...' lock, stock, and barrel, they're clearly not thinking coherently."

"Boys, we could probably keep this up until several years after he dies, if we're careful."

"Um, he's been dead for three weeks already. Hadn't you noticed?"

"I've spent the bulk of the last 37 years cleaning up men's lavatories, boys."

"Oh. Right."

Tales from a sentient chair

[PanAmaX]

Ever since his chair became self aware and seized control from Stephen a few years back its been spouting a lot of questionable statements.

Re:Tales from a sentient chair

[Not-a-Neg]

I read the summary while imagining it being spoken by the voice of the computer attached to his chair that we are all familiar with. I then figured his cringed expression and eye movement were a desperate plea for help but that no one was bothering to verify his eyes were pointing to the same letters the computer was speaking. For all we know he has been trying to warn us that Skynet became active during the Reagan administration.

He is right...

[martiniturbide]

...it is a portal to Another Universe called "Death" :)

Scales matter

[Anonymous Coward]

Space is compacted in a black hole, not just matter.

But let's just ignore that for now.

If the universe is just a computer simulation...

[Vermonter]

Then are black holes just portals to a different server?

Need to be a SMB

[rossdee]

unfortunately the common or garden tens of stellar mass black holes have too much gravitational gradient (tides) to be used

You would need to have a galaxy centre super massive black hole (millions or billions stellar mass) thats not feeding at the time

Ignore it

[BarbaraHudson]

His theory is so full of holes that he has to say it's not a bug, but a feature. :-)

cool. So where is door from others to here?

[WindBourne]

Seriously, if these are portal to others, then there has to be portals from others to here. Where are they?

Re:cool. So where is door from others to here?

[l0n3s0m3phr34k]

Hawking suggests as quoted here that a black hole IS a white hole. The "portal from others to here" is the black hole, that's what the Hawking radiation actually is...the deconstructed matter from another Universe entering ours. "black holes and white holes are the same object. The Hawking radiation from an ordinary black hole is then identified with the white-hole emission"

Re:cool. So where is door from others to here?

[amRadioHed]

Why do we need alternate explanations for Hawking Radiation? We've never even observed the stuff, we just think it exists based on our theoretical understanding of black holes. If we don't think it's created the same way now, who says it needs to exist at all?

Also our previous understand of Hawking Radiation had it decreasing with the size of the black hole. With this change it seems the opposite would be true.

Portals through Time

[Anonymous Coward]

I rather think like E=MC^2 that Black holes merely convert part of their mass into a geodesic potential along a time curve. Basically rather than exploding outwards, or rebounding outwards they explode upwards or along a different dimension. So no information is actually lost, its merely moved along a timeline much further forward in Time. Think of it like a projectile, which leaves the plane of a surface very quickly leaving a hole behind, but eventually returning as hawking radiation when the pieces fall back to the ground.

Black hole collapses are very messy affairs.. in which energy and mass are exchanged and it seems odd to consider their evolution to be confined to a small moment in time.

WINNER!!! You Just Won!!!!1!

[Anonymous Coward]

Here at TraVel we would like you to know that you are the lucky recipient of our all expenses paid Black Hole Travel Extravaganza!

Here are some reviews:
"It's a trip to a whole new universe!" -CPTOBV

"People everywhere are dying to go!" -NPR

"Never in my life would I have thought I would be able to go to a different universe!!!" -Noe Tisu Shmart

Stephen's mind is a portal to another universe.

[TomGreenhaw]

It's an imaginary universe simulated in his mind.

You go first, okay?

[RubberDogBone]

OK Professor Falcon -I mean Hawking, please be the first to test your theory.

Relatively few people, myself included, really want to be the first to jump in black hole to see if you are right.

Information coming here

[CanadianMacFan]

Since one of the key points of science is that there isn't a special point for your observations (for example the Earth isn't a special case) then we should be seeing information entering our universe from other ones. So what does this information look like after it passes through a black hole and how does it appear to the other universe? If we could look for that then it would be a good test for the theory. Or does the information just pass into a corresponding black hole in the other universe and isn't able to escape from that? If that's the case then it's a pretty useless idea.

Black Holes Don't Go Anywhere

[Anonymous Coward]

Black holes aren't holes. Duh.

May have lost his marbles...

[gweihir]

Or he may be on to something. At this stage in a typical career of a great physicist, both things are possible. Hawking has always been a great creative thinker in his area of expertise, what he currently claims is not out of character and may well be valid. Outside if his area of expertise, he is a hack, see his uninformed rantings about AI for example. Also not untypical for this development stage of a great physicist. But what really matters is what other physicists think about his statements about physical things.

The one thing that may not have been a good idea though is dumbing down his statements so that a general audience can "understand" them. General audiences are typically challenged to even understand simple scientific facts. They may just go along with them or reject them because they clash with some fuzzily defined beliefs. They routinely have no good justification for either behavior.

Re:May have lost his marbles...

[iggymanz]

"But what really matters is what other physicists think about his statements about physical things."

  What really matters is if his theory is a better model of reality than another theory. Reality doesn't care if your theory has a consensus of respected people.

Re:May have lost his marbles...

[gweihir]

So you want to do science without people involved? That does not actually work in reality ...

Sure, if there were a way to do it this way, i.e. to have some impersonal and reliable way to test whether a statement about physics is true, that would be preferable. But no such mechanism exists.

Re:May have lost his marbles...

[iggymanz]

Your knowledge of the history of science is rather flawed, quite a few giants in the field worked alone for years and achieved great things.

Re:May have lost his marbles...

[gweihir]

And these were recognized and remembered by whom? Seriously.

Re:May have lost his marbles...

[iggymanz]

Men who worked alone, in collaboration with no one, for years to make their theories and built the foundations of our science, to have their theories' usefulness later vindicated.

Just to name a few: Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Peter Higgs, Cavendish, Heisenberg and Dirac

Re:May have lost his marbles...

[gweihir]

And unless other physicists had recognized the value of their work, nobody would remember them today. I never said that it was important what other physicists think about the work _immediately_. A few years and sometimes decades later is fine. But none of the Physics accomplishments of Newton, Einstein, Cavendish, Heisenberg or Dirac would have ever have been of any effect without other physicists (eventually) recognizing them as worthwhile.

Someone is getting old...

[Anonymous Coward]

Isnt Steven Hawkings like 600 Steven Hawkings Years old? What's next, black holes have evil twins call white holes?

No, matter goes to this universe, but at t=0

[Anonymous Coward]

I assumed that since black holes are holes in spaceTIME, anything that ever goes into one, comes back out as a part of the Big Bang. Er, "came" back out...

Professor of Science Fiction

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry, but somebody needs to say it: Hawkings once had an interesting idea about black holes, and now he is severely disabled. One good idea does not mean anything else he says or thinks has any merit, and sympathy for his extreme health issues adds no credibility to his pronouncements.

Nobody has ever "seen" a black hole (yeah, I know, you can't see one directly with yer eyeballs (doh!)) but that's a simple way of expressing the fact that while we are reasonably sure they exist, nobody has every gotten close enough to one to directly measure/observe one in any real detail so all the details about them and their nature/characteristics are extremely theoretical. Nobody has ever actually observed another dimension or another universe. Other dimensions and alternate universes are so completely baseless they are less supported by actual science than "Noah's Ark" or "little green men from Mars". There's arguably several ancient stories about an Ark, and people have actually found hunks of ancient Gopherwood on Mt Ararat, which probably have nothing to do with an ancient barge andmakes for extremely thin evidence, but it's vastly more than for alternate universes. We have actual evidence for the existence of the planet Mars, and we know living creatures can exist on a planet, so that's more evidence for Martians than we have for most of what Hawkins is now saying about black holes as portals. Hell, the existence of horses and the existence of Narwhals provide a teensy tiny bit of evidence that a horse-like creature with a spike on its head is perhaps biologically possible, so I'm giving more credence to unicorns than to the stuff Hawkings has been issuing regular pronuncements about over the past few years. A bunch of imaginings, even if accompanied by a bunch of math that pretends to have any correlations with the imaginings is still not more scientific, it's just a logical fallacy related to the correlation-causation fallacy (math is math, if it happens to line-up with some physics/chemistry/geology/etc theory of anything, it can, but does not automatically, mean that the two are connected or that the one proves the other).

Has Mr Hawkings actually DONE ANY science in the past few decades, or does he just spend lots of time imagining things? Perhaps he ought to be working on scripts for the new Star Wars or Star Trek films.

Proof please Professor

[von Stalhein]

Show me the maths or no philosophical arguments can be entered into.