Interesting Article on Black Holes

[JPS35]

Interesting article on Hawking Radiation and black holes:

http://www.cnn.com/2015/09/03/opinions/lincoln-hawking-black-holes/index.html

 

[Fanatical Meat]

I saw this earlier but got lost. Could someone be kind enough to give me the dummy version?

 

[DrPizza]

I listened to an astronomer giving a talk on the black hole paradox this summer when I was at Michigan State. The basic gist of the talk was that Einstein said that there were four things you had to take into account, and if you neglected one of them, you would be left with a paradox - Hawking neglected one, and that's why he created this paradox. But, when you account for that fourth thing, the paradox goes away. I was drinking beer, not taking notes, so I don't recollect exactly what those four things are.

 

[kinev]

I listened to an astronomer giving a talk on the black hole paradox this summer when I was at Michigan State. The basic gist of the talk was that Einstein said that there were four things you had to take into account, and if you neglected one of them, you would be left with a paradox - Hawking neglected one, and that's why he created this paradox. But, when you account for that fourth thing, the paradox goes away. I was drinking beer, not taking notes, so I don't recollect exactly what those four things are.

Were you at State for the big Scout meeting?

 

[John Connor]

I saw this earlier but got lost. Could someone be kind enough to give me the dummy version?

Basically matter can't be destroyed. I always thought when I was young that black holes spew out radiation. That was my thought. But hawking says that this encoded information is left on the event horizon.

He's one hell of a smart dude. I wonder what kind of math you need to figure this stuff out?

 

[Matthiasa]

It would have almost meant something if other physicists didn't already hypothesis that years (decades?) ago...

 

[TheGardener]

I listened to an astronomer giving a talk on the black hole paradox this summer when I was at Michigan State. The basic gist of the talk was that Einstein said that there were four things you had to take into account, and if you neglected one of them, you would be left with a paradox - Hawking neglected one, and that's why he created this paradox. But, when you account for that fourth thing, the paradox goes away. I was drinking beer, not taking notes, so I don't recollect exactly what those four things are.

I'm not anti-beer, but I quickly found out that going to lunch during the work day and having a beer, was not conducive to doing detailed work, like spreadsheets and relational databases. I soon decided that beer drinking was best confined to after work activities. But thank you for your recollection, much as it is.

 

[DrPizza]

Were you at State for the big Scout meeting?

No, I was there a week before that though; at the Physics of Atomic Nuclei program. Got to see and learn really cool stuff, plenty of tours of the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory, behind the scenes look at all the work they're doing on FRIB (Facility for Rare Isotope Beams). I spent a week in awe at so many of the things that weren't conceived of even a decade ago.

 

[Gibsons]

Just looked at the article - isn't this what Susskind already said?
wiki:

Hawking proposed that information is lost in black holes, and not preserved in Hawking radiation.[2] Susskind disagreed, arguing that Hawking's conclusions violated one of the most basic scientific laws of the universe, the conservation of information. As Susskind depicts in his book, The Black Hole War was a "genuine scientific controversy" between scientists favoring an emphasis on the principles of relativity against those in favor of quantum mechanics.[1] The debate led to the holographic principle, proposed by Gerard 't Hooft and refined by Susskind, which suggested that the information is in fact preserved, stored on the boundary of a system.

The article:

He is countering the claim that the black hole gobbles and destroys the information by positing that the information never actually falls into the black hole. Instead, the information is held on the black hole's surface -- the event horizon.

This is an intriguing thought and is analogous to how holograms are made. Holograms are two-dimensional sheets of, for example, plastic that can make three-dimensional images.

 

[WaTaGuMp]

I thought it would be another Kardashian story.

 

[Unico]

Black holes are to physicists as dinosaurs are to geologists. Not really any practical value to it.

There is better money if you devote your career to bombs or oil. Kind of sad really.

 

[Craig234]

Black holes are to physicists as dinosaurs are to geologists. Not really any practical value to it.

There is better money if you devote your career to bombs or oil. Kind of sad really.

I'd say the pure science is something society should put value on and fund.

Your last comment I agree with.

 

[Craig234]

Preservation of matter and energy I've heard, what is their definition of information?

 

[NikolaeVarius]

Black holes are to physicists as dinosaurs are to geologists. Not really any practical value to it.

There is better money if you devote your career to bombs or oil. Kind of sad really.

Why is it sad? Studying this shit is expensive as fuck and time consuming for no real return on that initial investment.

Black Hole stuff is a lot of intellectual circle jerking because there is very little actual experimentation that we can actually do, so we're mostly left with theoretical math and any random crazy idea that a physicist can manage to shove into the numbers.

Preservation of matter and energy I've heard, what is their definition of information?

Quantum state. Preservation of matter and energy at its core.

Also, so very relevant.

http://smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2075#comic

 

[DrPizza]

Why is it sad? Studying this shit is expensive as fuck and time consuming for no real return on that initial investment.

Black Hole stuff is a lot of intellectual circle jerking because there is very little actual experimentation that we can actually do, so we're mostly left with theoretical math and any random crazy idea that a physicist can manage to shove into the numbers.




Quantum state. Preservation of matter and energy at its core.

Also, so very relevant.

http://smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2075#comic

Perhaps you should say, "no guaranteed return on that initial investment." Pure science research has tons of spin-off technologies that wouldn't exist without someone exploring the unknown. It wasn't much more than 100 years ago when pure science research led to the discovery of the electron. How important was that?? How about the pure research that led to an understanding of quantum mechanics? How many devices wouldn't we have today without the pure science research that was done? (Almost all technology). Who knows what technologies may be gained from a better understanding of the most basic physics? Hell, just exploring atomic nuclei has led to tons of medical equipment and procedures - radioactive isotopes used in treatments as well as scans, machines like MRIs, etc. - I mentioned above some of the stuff I had the ability to participate in earlier in the summer. It's ironic that someone might say to those researchers who are exploring atomic nuclei, "why don't you do something useful like learn to cure cancer?" And, the answer is, "why, yes, this research we're doing actually has spun off into a new way to treat cancer."

 

[Charmonium]

Hawking's statement avoids the black hole firewall problem w/o invoking wormholes as Susskind and I think Maldacena have proposed. But I thought that bh's were supposed to be singularities - iow, infinitely dense points in space-time. This seems to toss that idea out the window. So how do manage to get a singularity which isn't a singularity but a hollow sphere?

 

[darkswordsman17]

Hawking's statement avoids the black hole firewall problem w/o invoking wormholes as Susskind and I think Maldacena have proposed. But I thought that bh's were supposed to be singularities - iow, infinitely dense points in space-time. This seems to toss that idea out the window. So how do manage to get a singularity which isn't a singularity but a hollow sphere?

I don't know much about black holes, is there something that says they have to be anything more than "black holes", like bubbles of non-universe space that somehow managed to occur within universe space? What are the edges of the universe that like?

Didn't they find that expansion of space is actually increasing? What if it's being drawn apart similarly to how black holes pull things towards them? What if the edge of the universe is the flip side of a black hole?

Maybe the universe is effectively folding back on itself, where it's expanding, but then will either reach a point where it rubber bands back, or maybe curves back in on itself?

I've wondered about things like heat death. Perhaps once that is achieved, and no more energy output can be sustained, that it will then cool, and shrink back, eventually converging back to the state of the big bang, triggering it all over again.

 

[Charmonium]

I've always heard singularities described as someplace where you have infinite curvature of space-time. Of course no one really understands what that means so you end up with bizarre notions like black holes connecting distant parts of the universe.

What Hawking seems to be proposing is that regardless of what a bh is, or IOW what creates the event horizon, the matter that falls in exists on a 2 dimensional surface - sort of the opposite of the concept of a singularity.

In terms of the expansion of space due to dark energy, people seem to have even less of a clue about that than dark matter. In General Relativity it's the cosomological constant. Except it seems that the 'constant' has varied over the life of the universe.

The bottom line is that no one REALLY understands any of this stuff. We have theories that do a decent job of explaining and predicting a lot of what we observe, but there are gaping holes all over the place and we still can't even begin to understand what makes up about 95% of the mass in the universe.

 

[Craig234]

We don't have answers to huge questions - what is 'outside the universe', alternate dimensions, what was just before the big bang.

It's not that long ago they found that apparently (nearly?) every galaxy has a black hole in the center.

 

[Howard]

Perhaps you should say, "no guaranteed return on that initial investment." Pure science research has tons of spin-off technologies that wouldn't exist without someone exploring the unknown. It wasn't much more than 100 years ago when pure science research led to the discovery of the electron. How important was that?? How about the pure research that led to an understanding of quantum mechanics? How many devices wouldn't we have today without the pure science research that was done? (Almost all technology). Who knows what technologies may be gained from a better understanding of the most basic physics? Hell, just exploring atomic nuclei has led to tons of medical equipment and procedures - radioactive isotopes used in treatments as well as scans, machines like MRIs, etc. - I mentioned above some of the stuff I had the ability to participate in earlier in the summer. It's ironic that someone might say to those researchers who are exploring atomic nuclei, "why don't you do something useful like learn to cure cancer?" And, the answer is, "why, yes, this research we're doing actually has spun off into a new way to treat cancer."

You really didn't have to go to the effort to post a real response to a guy who's regularly shown he already knows it all.