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Math Shows Some Black Holes Erase Your Past and Give You Unlimited Futures (vice.com)
dmoberhaus writes: An international team of mathematicians has found that there are theoretical black holes that would allow an observer to survive passage through the event horizon. This would result in the breakdown of determinism, a fundamental feature of the universe that allows physics to have predictive power, and result in the destruction of the observer's past and present them with an infinite number of futures. The findings were detailed in a report published last week in Physical Review Letters.
Summary implies conflation of mathematical artefacts with physical reality. Real paper is probably quite dry and abstract.
Math does not apply to reality. It always only applies to an abstraction of reality and that loses accuracy, sometimes catastrophically as almost certainly happened in this case.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
People tend to believe that physics is applied math. It's not. The universe doesn't care about your math. General Relativity is a set of mathematical equations that were picked because they could model the observed experimental data. Yes, it proved to be a very accurate theory by predicting future experimental results decades after it was published. That doesn't mean that every single prediction will be true. So until an experiment can confirm these results, nothing has been "shown", as the headline implies. This doesn't mean these findings aren't relevant. On the contrary, finding these edge cases is what allows theories to be tested and be eventually replaced by a better model.
... determinism, a fundamental feature of the universe ...
While we may wish for determinism, it has been shown long before that it does not exist.Since it was shown that we can not accurately know both the position of a particle and its speed, it has been proven that predicting the future is impossible because it is impossible to know the present, let alone calculate the future by using the present as a starting condition. So determinism is absolutely not a feature of the universe.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
Math just manipulates numbers. Add, Subtract, Multiply, Divide, etc... that's MATH.
Humans assign MEANING to numbers.
5/10=0.5 is MATH.
5/10 where a human says this is L/D means the Lift over drag ratio is 0.5 to an aero person.
5/10 where a human says this is I=V/R means that 0.5 Amps results from 5 Volts and 10 Ohms to an EE.
MATH shows nothing on its own. Now, let's see what evidence these authors have for the idea that their equations have ANYTHING to do with what they are arguing.
They could, to borrow from above (for simplicity) say that S=M1/M2 where S=a coefficent for how fast time flows in a black hole, where M1=mass of object crossing event horizon and M2 = mass of black hole..... then plug in 5 for M1 and 10 for M2 and get 0.5 for the coefficient the MATH would be "good" but there's nothing saying that the human meaning assighed to that math has ANY applicability or validity and thus the MATH says nothing more than that 5/10 = 0.5
People need to become a LOT more skeptical in this era of more people with science degrees than the marketplace demands, and gazillions of science papers, many with subjects that SOUND "sciencey" but which will never be ACTUALLY TESTABLE in anybody's lifetime.
Theory and practice are the same in theory, but not in practice.
> Math containing infinties doesn't really work.
I don't wish to sound snide: But I think you'll find, if you look more carefully, that It works very well: Infinite series are much of the foundation of calculus. Even countable numbers, involve "infinities" because they are unbounded.