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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.
Murph!!
This seems risky, even if it were possible to approach a black hole. In this case, I'll choose to not believe what my teacher tells me.
"Math isn't going to bring you back from the dead"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Mmm...no.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Summary implies conflation of mathematical artefacts with physical reality. Real paper is probably quite dry and abstract.
They mean pork belly futures.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
This looks like a division by zero.. but instead of understanding the logical error that put them in that impossible situation and fixing it, they just keep on doing more math over it....
When mass hits the speed of light, it does not travel back in time... It just louses all mass properties and turns into light.
1/(x*x) will never be negative with a real input!!!
Physicists should not be mathematicians, they should be primarily physicists. Not everything is real what math allows. If that were the case, the SU(5)
model (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgi%E2%80%93Glashow_model) would have worked.
Mathematics can describe reality, but reality is not mathematics.
Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer. - Ludwig von Mises
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.
A human surviving forever in one piece? Or a single particle stuck in time? Or?
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.
Only difference between black holes and neutron stars is black holes overcome pauli and everything collapses into a shared state. Big whoop. Assertions of "infinite density" are nonsense. There is no evidence single massive shared states have exactly zero extent or that length is not quantized and energy sure as heck is not infinite so jumping to "infinite density" conclusions is premature at best. Neither is there anything special about escape velocities approaching C. Of course there are effectively incalculable (yet not unlimited) futures embedded in the ginormous quantum state making up the black hole.
Infinite density is a scam.
Determinism is a scam.
(Ir)reversibility as constructed is essentially a tautology.
I'm not in the field either, but I hope someone can explain this a little better since the actual paper is behind a paywall and the oversimplified and popularized Motherboard article doesn't make any sense.
Motherboard says that the laws of the universe, outside of black holes, are supposedly deterministic. That's news to me, I thought quantum mechanics dealt with probabilities and there was no way to predict what part a particle will take. The universe plays dice all the time, it only appears to be deterministic on a large scale when the probabilities of the individual particles average out to a largely predictable macroscopic result.
Then, what does it mean when they say your past is destroyed? Let me get this straight, you fall into one of these special black holes, you survive (which, I assume, includes your memories), yet your past is "destroyed"? I imagine they mean that the laws transfer to a different coordinate system where your past is no longer at negative time coordinates but simply nowhere at all. Which isn't really that unusual. Just use a different coordinate system (one tied to your body) and the past will be there again, still inaccessible at the usual negative coordinates (but formulas for describing your current environment will be very complicated). Pretty sure that's what they meant, right?
OK, what about the unlimited futures? Again, I though quantum mechanics already gave us those. I guess it means that the future will be a lot more undeterministic than usual?
Finally, the big discovery seems to be that you won't be destroyed by all the energy of the universe falling through the event horizon at the same time as you, thanks to the expansion of the universe. But what about spaghettification? Won't you still be killed by the enormous differential gravitation even if you survive the radiation at the horizon? How does the charge of the black hole prevent that from happening?
Thanks in advance to anyone who can clear this up a bit more.
Those experiencing it claim the past really did change and it's not their faulty memory. It's name comes from them remembering Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 80's.
Not orange juice futures?
Depends if you pick the right black hole or not. Either way, you're not going to be coming back from it.
If you gave me a choice between a printer and a giraffe with explosive diarrhoea, i'll get my ladder and my raincoat
Or maybe just the hypothesis being espoused is. It seems like an indeterministic universe where effect no longer follows cause would be completely antithetical to life. Our existence utterly relies on cause and effect, without it, the first problem would be creating matter at all, let alone organizing into elements, then minerals, amino acids, cells, cell groups, and so on.
So... you don't have infinite futures if you were to cross the event horizon. You still have none.
All those parking tickets: gone!
Table-ized A.I.
... 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!
Not quite, e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdeterminism
The future is ours!
To cover this ( if valid they no doubt will) already have a collection of blackhole episodes
https://m.youtube.com/results?q=space%20time%20black%20hole%20&sm=1
So in other words, they supposedly discovered: The History Eraser Button. The JOLLY CANDY LIKE BUTTON. Sometimes when I read this drivel I wish someone did actually find the history eraser button to erase human stupidity.
We'll make great pets
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
This is just pure common sense sprinkled with a slight bit of meta physics. We know this is true for now because all methods of taking these measurements you describe involves "bumping" the particles in question thus changing their state. In order to truly know the state at some fixed time, we would need to plug into the back-end of the system from outside of it and to our knowledge this is impossible. From a software developer's perspective, this is akin to being able to write something directly from the system to the console log. It would require there to be a "command" to issue to the universe like: getPositionOfEntity(e) and part of the subroutine is writing the answer to some medium that humans can parse.
We'll make great pets
I hereby demonstrate my complete lack of understanding slashdot readers by linking to the full article on arxiv It's kind of an interesting mathematical exercise in the physics of charged black holes under various conditions but obviously does not reflect reality. For example, you would need a large positive cosmological constant, and an extreme ratio of charge to mass for this to be relevant. Further the clickbait headline implies some kind of retroactive erasure of the onserver when in reality it just means you can't reconstruct the past from future observations due to a breakdown in how the math works. This may not even be true at all because we know that general relativity does not fully describe spacetime at the extremes found at the surface horizons of black holes anyway.
Sure, but GPS wouldn't work (or rarher, would be simpler) in that case. The weirdest things in the universe are proven by your phone existing.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
With my past destroyed, the one where I *didn't* enter a future-granting black hole and lived a mundane human life didn't happen.
Infinite futures means that in one of my futures, benevolent aliens gave me two cloned Jessica Alba sexbots.
WOO!
Do I get to tell people I had a threesome with Jessica Alba now?
On a fundemental level, eliminating large class of hidden variable, you have an unpredictible system. But while unpredictible it still follow a distributioon of probability, which when you go to the macro level end up eliminating it partially enough that our own macro world looks deterministic enough to be qualified as such. Think about it as newton physic versus GR, for a moving car newton is enough, for shooting a ball or cascading domino determinism is good enough. I would argue that as such the universe is deterministic enough for the most common human understanding of it.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
and result in the destruction of the observer's past and present them with an infinite number of futures.
Nooooo!!!
That's just what they want you to think!
Don't get on the carousel!!!
against spreading of pseudo-scientific highly abstract disconnected from reality unverifiable utter bullshit, like the laws against spreading of porn.
Berenstein Bears and the black hole!
are so much more accessible
Just to put a damper on discussions...
1) "theoretical black holes", meaning they may not exist naturally. If they do, they could be rare. At any rate travelling to any of them in the near future is impossible.
2) If one were to say artificially construct one of these things, in order for it to be big enough to fit a human though, it would have to be at least a certain size. A casual search indicates that a 5m event horizon black hole will have the approximate mass of Jupiter. So if it is constructed anywhere near Earth it will probably destroy it. If done in the solar system, could potentially mess with orbits catastrophically if not very careful.
Or for the more sophisticated among us, Command-Z.
oops, sorry about that.
Go, travel to a black hole, go through the event horizon and have the eternal life you always wanted and deserve.
Wish you all the happiness you deserve!
DT arrives at the pearly gate to enter heaven. Trumpets sound, the gates open and he is guided by two huge angles on his side to the throne with the almighty god.
God addressed DT and asks: "Do you have anything to say to me?".
DT: Ah, you are the guy sitting in my seat, get out!
Motherboard is full of shit. A brief study of complex systems and emergence will convince most people of what many already know. Namely, that the universe we can observe is anything but deterministic. This is perspicuous and observable at the macro level, without even having to appeal to the mystical incantations of the quantum level.
Looks more like a hype article based on false assumptions and completely eviscerated of any possible relevance by a combination of click-hunting and grant-hunting word sieves.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
Sounds to me like they are describing movement to a different bubble universe, where you did not exist before. The math is incomplete, though, so it is not includng the bounds of the previous universe. Your history probably still would exist there.
I wonder if their math encountered the square root of minus one? That usually indicates that there are other dimensions/degrees of freedom that were not taken into account.
oops
If you think everyone else is stupid, you probably have it backward. A lot of that going around these days... 8-)
They field they are in is "left".
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
FCOJ
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
> Finally, the big discovery seems to be that you won't be destroyed by all the energy of the universe
> falling through the event horizon at the same time as you, thanks to the expansion of the universe.
The catch here is that, "all the energy in the universe," may not be hitting you as you fall through the event horizon, but a lot will, more than likely enough to give you a Bad Day. You're only down from "infinity" to "the horizon observable over the black hole's future," still a pretty big number.
> But what about spaghettification?
Others have answered this, that the gravity gradients are soft enough around a big enough black hole.
There is another fun fact here... For spinning black holes, which I believe means most of them, or at least the big ones we could think of entering in the non-spaghetti state, there are actually two event horizons, and it might be possible to leave from the zone in between them. Gregory Benford, physicist and science fiction author, set several books in that region.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
The catch here is that, "all the energy in the universe," may not be hitting you as you fall through the event horizon, but a lot will, more than likely enough to give you a Bad Day. You're only down from "infinity" to "the horizon observable over the black hole's future," still a pretty big number.
Indeed, that's another thing I was wondering about but forgot to mention.
For spinning black holes, which I believe means most of them, or at least the big ones we could think of entering in the non-spaghetti state, there are actually two event horizons, and it might be possible to leave from the zone in between them.
Wow, you learn something new every day, thank you!
Just to nitpick: thr fact that we can not measure the present does not mean that the future is not deterministic.
The particle you measure will go where it goes, unless you measure it. Then it is going where your measurement is deflecting it to.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.105...
OK, what about the unlimited futures? Again, I though quantum mechanics already gave us those. I guess it means that the future will be a lot more undeterministic than usual?
It means that there is still a possibility that I get to have a threesome with Alizee and Selena Gomez. Now if I could only find a black hole...
I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.
My guess is that what they meant to say is that passage through the event horizon would violate causality, not determinism.
Spaghettification is not a feature of event horizons, it is a feature of gravity wells. The spatial location where tidal forces turn lethal can be far below the event horizon of a very massive black hole, and higher for a small one.
I'm not in the field either
I'm in the field and just stepped in cow poop.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
That getting to the event horizon takes an infinite amount of time. So it will never occur. Hawking radiation will make the event horizon recede before you can get there anyway, and probably kill you in the process.
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
Motherboard says that the laws of the universe, outside of black holes, are supposedly deterministic. That's news to me, I thought quantum mechanics dealt with probabilities and there was no way to predict what part a particle will take. The universe plays dice all the time, it only appears to be deterministic on a large scale when the probabilities of the individual particles average out to a largely predictable macroscopic result.
It looks like the article conflates determinism and deterministic. Determinism is roughly synonymous with causality, which is what I assume the paper is talking about.
Just to nitpick: thr fact that we can not measure the present does not mean that the future is not deterministic.
The particle you measure will go where it goes, unless you measure it. Then it is going where your measurement is deflecting it to.
That is one way of thinking about how the universe *might* work.
Another way to think about it is a particle exists in a superposition state of many positions (each with their own probability), and it will effectively go everywhere, until you measure it and then all the things that it has interacted with in the past and transferred momentum to (even if they are now far away) are adjusted to be consistent with your current measurement.
Although you might think the second way of thinking of how the universe might work as being too complex and dismiss it via the principle of Occam's razor, you should remember, that Occam's razor is only used to say that complex explanations should not be introduced unless *necessary*. Given the current amount of empirical evidence about the function of quantum mechanics, the simpler way of thinking doesn't seem to have sufficient explanatory power, so...
As an aside, there is acutally QM way to do so-called interaction-free measurement as well. It may defy intuition, but there is evidence for these effects as well...
For those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it. -- Neils Bohr
The "paradox" is only a conflict between reality and your feeling of what reality "ought to be." -- Richard Feynman
It is a copy.
Not according to my copy.
Let me get this straight, you fall into one of these special black holes, you survive (which, I assume, includes your memories),
It seems clear to me that to the extent that "you" fall into such a black hole, you are a particle not a human. Since, apparantly, once you're inside determinism no longer applies there is no way your human body with all its complex interactions will still function properly and you as a person will cease to be pretty fast.
sigs are hazardous to your health
It's getting them to join you into that black hole that's going to be the hard part...