Slashdot Mirror
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!
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.