“Alien Life On Mars Destroyed By Floods” Leading Scientists Believe
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Maybe you’re out trying to find a new habitable planet for the human race, or maybe you’re just on a long walk and you slip. Whatever the circumstances, at some point we all find ourselves confronted with the age-old question: what happens when you fall into a black hole?
You might expect to get crushed, or maybe torn to pieces. But the reality is stranger than that.
The instant you entered the black hole, reality would split in two. In one, you would be instantly incinerated, and in the other you would plunge on into the black hole utterly unharmed.
Black holes are without question some of the strangest places in the universe. So massive that they hideously deform space and time, so dense that their centers are called “points at infinity,” and pitch- black because not even light can escape them, it isn’t surprising that so many people wonder what it would be like to visit one.
It’s not exactly a restive vacation spot, as it turns out.
Heavy objects warp the fabric of space itself (Credit: Julian Baum/SPL)
Near a black hole roughly the size of Earth, tidal forces are magnified off the scale. Swan-diving into one, the top of your head would feel so much more gravitational pull than the tips of your toes that you would be stretched, longer and longer. “[The British astrophysicist] Sir Martin Rees coined the term ‘spaghettification,’ which is a perfectly good way to put it. You eventually become a stream of subatomic particles that swirl into the black hole.
Because your brain would dissociate into its constituent atoms almost instantly, you’d have little opportunity to soak in the scenery at the threshold of an Earth-size black hole.
However, if you’re dead-set on visiting a space-time singularity, we recommend going big; bigger black holes have less extreme surfaces. “If you had a black hole the size of our solar system, then the tidal forces at the event horizon … are not quite that strong. So you could actually maintain your structural integrity.
In that case, you would get to experience the effects of the curvature of space-time, predicted by Einstein’s general theory of relativity, firsthand.
“First of all, you approach the speed of light as you fall into the black hole. So the faster you move through space, the slower you move through time,” he said. “Furthermore, as you fall, there are things that have been falling in front of you that have experienced an even greater ‘time dilation’ than you have. So if you’re able to look forward toward the black hole, you see every object that has fallen into it in the past. And then if you look backwards, you’ll be able to see everything that will ever fall into the black hole behind you”.
“So the upshot is, you’ll get to see the entire history of that spot in the universe simultaneously,” he said, “from the Big Bang all the way into the distant future.”
The outermost boundary of the hole is its event horizon, the point at which the gravitational force precisely counteracts the light’s efforts to escape it. Go closer than this, and there’s no escape.
The event horizon is not a solid barrier (Credit: Richard Kail/SPL)
The event horizon is ablaze with energy. Quantum effects at the edge create streams of hot particles that radiate back out into the universe. This is called Hawking radiation, after the physicist Stephen Hawking, who predicted it. Given enough time, the black hole will radiate away its mass, and vanish.
“Hawking radiation” flows out of the event horizon (Credit: Richard Kail/SPL)
As you go deeper into the black hole, space becomes ever more curvy until, at the centre, it becomes infinitely curved. This is the singularity. Space and time cease to be meaningful ideas, and the laws of physics as we know them — all of which require space and time — no longer apply.
What happens here, no one knows. Another universe? Oblivion? The back of a bookcase? It’s a mystery.
Black holes are a passage to another universe, says Stephen Hawking
Black holes in fact aren’t as “black” as people thought and could be a way of getting through to an alternative universe.
“The existence of alternative histories with black holes suggests this might be possible,” Hawking said, according to a report from Stockholm University. “The hole would need to be large and if it was rotating it might have a passage to another universe. But you couldn’t come back to our universe.
Humans could escape from black holes, rather than getting stuck in them, according to a new theory proposed by Stephen Hawking.
Unfortunate space travelers won’t be able to return to their own universe, according to Hawking. But they will be able to escape somewhere else, he has proposed at a conference in Stockholm.
“The existence of alternative histories with black holes suggests this might be possible,” Hawking said, according to a report from Stockholm University. “The hole would need to be large and if it was rotating it might have a passage to another universe. But you couldn’t come back to our universe.
Hawking’s proposal is an attempt to answer a problem that has tormented physicists about what happens to things when they go beyond the event horizon, where even light can’t get back. The information about the object has to be preserved, scientists believe, even if the thing itself is swallowed up — and that paradox has puzzled scientists for decades.
Now Hawking has proposed that the information is stored on the boundary, at the event horizon. That means that it never makes its way into the black hole, and so never needs to make its way out again either.
That would also mean that humans might not disappear if they fall into one. They’d either stay as a “hologram” on the edge, or fall out somewhere else.
The presentation was made at the Hawking Radiation conference, which was co-hosted by the theoretical physics institute, Nordita, and the University of North Carolina, on the campus of KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. Nordita is driven by both KTH and Stockholm University.
The best description of a spinning black hole was given in 1963 by the New Zealand mathematician Roy Kerr, using Einstein’s equations of gravity. But there is a quirky feature to his solution. It predicts that if one fell into a black hole, one might be sucked down a tunnel (called the “Einstein-Rosen bridge”) and shot out a “white hole” in a parallel universe! Kerr showed that a spinning black hole would collapse not into a point, but to a “ring of fire.” Because the ring was spinning rapidly, centrifugal forces would keep it from collapsing. Remarkably, a space probe fired directly through the ring would not be crushed into oblivion, but might actually emerge unscratched on the other side of the Einstein-Rosen bridge, in a parallel universe. This “wormhole” may connect two parallel universes, or even distant parts of the same universe.
Through the Looking Glass
When Alice falls into the rabbit hole, she experiences a host of “curiouser and curiouser” phenomena. She gets smaller, she gets bigger, she almost drowns in a sea of her own tears and she meets an assembly of strange creatures. As it turns out, falling into a black hole may rival the strange experiences described by Lewis Carroll in his classic fantasy. Unlike Alice, however, who emerges from her adventures no worse for the wear, a person who journeys into one of the universe’s most mysterious objects is not likely to fare so well.
The simplest way to visualize a Kerr wormhole is to think of Alice’s Looking Glass. Anyone walking through the Looking Glass would be transported instantly into Wonderland, a world where animals talked in riddles and common sense wasn’t so common.
The rim of the Looking Glass corresponds to the Kerr ring. Anyone walking through the Kerr ring might be transported to the other side of the universe or even the past. Like two Siamese twins joined at the hip, we now have two universes joined via the Looking Glass.
Some physicists have wondered whether black holes or worm- holes might someday be used as shortcuts to another sector of our universe, or even as a time machine to the distant past (making possible the swashbuckling exploits in Star Wars). However, we caution that there are skeptics.
The critics concede that hundreds of wormhole solutions have now been found to Einstein’s equations, and hence they cannot be lightly dismissed as the ravings of crack pots. But they point out that wormholes might be unstable, or that intense radiation and sub-atomic forces surrounding the entrance to the wormhole would kill anyone who dared to enter.
Spirited debates have erupted between physicists concerning these wormholes. Unfortunately, this controversy cannot be re- solved, because Einstein’s equations break down at the center of black holes or wormholes, where radiation and sub-atomic forces might be ferocious enough to collapse the entrance. The problem is Einstein’s theory only works for gravity, not the quantum forces which govern radiation and sub-atomic particles. What is needed is a theory which embraces both the quantum theory of radiation and gravity simultaneously.
In a word, to solve the problem of quantum black holes, we need a “theory of everything!”
A Theory of Everything?
One of the crowning achievements of 20th century science is that all the laws of physics, at a fundamental level, can be summarized by just two formalisms:
(1) Einstein’s theory of gravity, which gives us a cosmic description of the very large, i.e. galaxies, black holes and the Big Bang.
(2) the quantum theory, which gives us a microscopic description of the very small, i.e. the microcosm of sub-atomic particles and radiation. But the supreme irony, and surely one of Nature’s cosmic jokes, is that they look bewilderingly different; even the world’s greatest physicists, including Einstein and Heisenberg, have failed to unify these into one. The two theories use different mathematics and different physical principles to describe the universe in their respective domains, the cosmic and the microscopic.
Fortunately, we now have a candidate for this theory. (In fact, it is the only candidate. Scores of rival proposals have all been shown to be inconsistent.) It’s called “superstring theory,” and almost effortlessly unites gravity with a theory of radiation, which is required to solve the problem of quantum wormholes.
String Theory – New Documentary 2015
The superstring theory can explain the mysterious quantum laws of sub-atomic physics by postulating that sub-atomic particles are really just resonances or vibrations of a tiny string. The vibrations of a violin string correspond to musical notes; likewise the vibrations of a superstring correspond to the particles found in nature. The universe is then a symphony of vibrating strings.
An added bonus is that, as a string moves in time, it warps the fabric of space around it, producing black holes, wormholes, and other exotic solutions of Einstein’s equations. Thus, in one stroke, the superstring theory unites both the theory of Einstein and quantum physics into one coherent, compelling picture.
A 10 Dimensional Universe
The curious feature of superstrings, however, is that they can only vibrate in 10 dimensions. This is, in fact, one of the reasons why it can unify the known forces of the universe: in 10 dimensions there is “more room” to accommodate both Einstein’s theory of gravity as well as sub-atomic physics. In some sense, previous attempts at unifying the forces of nature failed because a standard four dimensional theory is “too small” to jam all the forces into one mathematical framework.
To visualize higher dimensions, consider a Japanese tea garden, where carp spend their entire lives swimming on the bottom of a shallow pond. The carp are only vaguely aware of a world beyond the surface. To a carp “scientist,” the universe only consists of two dimensions, length and width. There is no such thing as “height.” In fact, they are incapable of imagining a third dimension beyond the pond.
The word “up” has no meaning for them. (Imagine their distress if we were to suddenly lift them out of their two dimensional universe into “hyperspace,” i.e. our world!) However, if it rains, then the surface of their pond becomes rippled. Although the third dimension is beyond their comprehension, they can clearly see the waves traveling on the pond’s surface.
Likewise, although we earthlings cannot “see” these higher dimensions, we can see their ripples when they vibrate. According to this theory, “light” is nothing but vibrations rippling along the 5th dimension. By adding higher dimensions, we can easily accommodate more and more forces, including the nuclear forces. In a nutshell: the more dimensions we have, the more forces we can accommodate.
One persistent criticism of this theory, however, is that we do not see these higher dimensions in the laboratory. At present, every event in the universe, from the tiniest sub-atomic decay to exploding galaxies, can be described by 4 numbers (length, width, depth, and time), not 10 numbers. To answer this criticism, many physicists believe (but cannot yet prove) that the universe at the instant of the Big Bang was in fact fully 10 dimensional.
Only after the instant of creation did 6 of the 10 dimensions “curled up” into a ball too tiny to observe. In a real sense, this theory is really a theory of creation, when the full power of 10 dimensional space-time was manifest.
21st Century Physics
Not surprisingly, the mathematics of the 10th dimensional superstring is breathtakingly beautiful as well as brutally complex, and has sent shock waves through the mathematics community. Entirely new areas of mathematics have been opened up by this theory. Unfortunately, at present no one is smart enough to solve the problem of a quantum black hole.
Out of those dimensions we can only perceive 3 dimensions. But what if we could experience more dimensions? How would our body cope up with those multi-dimensions? What would they look like? Well checkout this amazing video below to answer that question:
As Edward Witten of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton has claimed, “String theory is 21st century physics that fell accidentally into the 20th century.” However, 21st century mathematics necessary to solve quantum black holes has not yet been discovered! However, since the stakes are so high, that hasn’t stopped teams of enterprising physicists from trying to solve superstring theory.
So that’s where we stand today. Many physicists now feel that it’s only a matter of time before some enterprising physicist completely cracks this ticklish problem. The equations, although difficult, are well-defined. So until then, it’s still a bit premature to buy tickets to the nearest wormhole to visit the next galaxy or hunt dinosaurs!
Not such a bad way to go, in the grand scheme of things.
What do you think is on the other side of a Black Hole?
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Thanks for Reading,
Brent Peterson@UAATN.COM
