Posted on 06/20/2007 4:12:14 PM PDT by LibWhacker
"Nothing there," is what Case Western Reserve University physicists concluded about black holes after spending a year working on complex formulas to calculate the formation of new black holes. In nearly 13 printed pages with a host of calculations, the research may solve the information loss paradox that has perplexed physicists for the past 40 years.
Case physicists Tanmay Vachaspati, Dejan Stojkovic and Lawrence M. Krauss report in the article, "Observation of Incipient Black Holes and the Information Loss Problem,” that has been accepted for publication by Physical Review D.
"It's complicated and very complex," noted the researchers, regarding both the general problem and their particular approach to try to solve it.
The question that the physicists set out to solve is: what happens once something collapses into a black hole" If all information about the collapsing matter is lost, it defies the laws of quantum physics. Yet, in current thinking, once the matter goes over the event horizon and forms a black hole, all information about it is lost.
"If you define the black hole as some place where you can lose objects, then there is no such thing because the black hole evaporates before anything is seen to fall in," said Vachaspati.
The masses on the edge of the incipient black hole continue to appear into infinity that they are collapsing but never fall over inside what is known as the event horizon, the region from which there is no return, according to the researchers.
By starting out with something that was nonsingular and then collapsing that matter, they were determined to see if an event horizon formed, signaling the creation of a black hole.
The mass shrinks in size, but it never gets to collapse inside an event horizon due to evidence of pre-Hawking radiation, a non-thermal radiation that allows information of the nature of what is collapsing to be recovered far from the collapsing mass.
"Non-thermal radiation can carry information in it unlike thermal radiation. This means that an outside observer watching some object collapse receives non-thermal radiation back and may be able to reconstruct all the information in the initial object and so the information never gets lost," they said.
According to the researchers, if black holes exist, information formed in the initial state would disappear in the black hole through a burst of thermal radiation that carries no information about the initial state.
Using the functional Schrodinger formalism, the researchers suggest that information about the energy from radiation is long evaporated before an event horizon forms.
"An outside observer will never lose an object down a black hole," said Stojkovic. "If you are sitting outside and throwing something into the black hole, it will never pass over but will stay outside the event horizon even if one considers the effects of quantum mechanics. In fact, since in quantum mechanics the observer plays an important role in measurement, the question of formation of an event horizon is much more subtle to consider."
The physicists are quick to assure astronomers and astrophysicists that what is observed in gravity pulling masses together still holds true, but what is controversial about the new finding is that "from an external viewer's point it takes an infinite amount of time to form an event horizon and that the clock for the objects falling into the black hole appears to slow down to zero," said Krauss, director of Case's Center for Education and Research in Cosmology.
He continued "this is one of the factors that led us to rethink this problem, and we hope our proposal at the very least will stimulate a broader reconsideration of these issues."
If black holes exist in the universe, the astrophysicists speculate they were formed only at the beginning of time.
Source: Case Western Reserve University
There’s something there. It’s just not as described in the literature. Information is not lost.
What's fun is when they start talking about creating an entire universe in the lab, one that is just as large as ours, has just as much matter in it, and one that will hyper-expand just as rapidly ours. But don't worry. It won't hurt us. It'll make its own space as it goes through its Big Bang period and not intrude into ours.
NOT GUILTY!!
Oops... Wrong thread.
My bad.
WHICH FORMS FROM!!!
i give :-(
Actually, no observer would survive long enough to find out. Tidal forces would rip them to pieces long before they reached the event horizon.
Quite fascinating. Thank you for the link. We live our normal lives in a very narrow range of physical magnitudes.
My brain hurts. The bit in quantum physics about observations being effected by the fact of observation gives me the willies. Going back to pondering why any Republicans would support this amnesty bill.
Tidal effects would be lethal long before getting to the event horizon. Assuming The invention of gravity opaque paint (I think H.G. Wells originally came up with the idea) and you survived the tidal forces, you would perceive yourself falling headlong towards the black hole. If somebody 10 billion years from now could retrieve you, you would perceive them pulling you out in the nick of time.
Very similar to the speed of light. If you could constantly accelerate at one gravity, you would eventually percieve that you were traveling faster than the speed of light but outside observers would see us as slowly approaching the speed of light but never reaching it. From the perspective of a photon, it is emitted from a star and instantly appears at it’s destination but from our perspective, they can take billions of years to reach us.
They are trying to say, a point singularity cannot form. The collapsing matter will form something that from our perspective is a black hole but in reality is something different.
The object will be terribly dense but over the course of eternity will never form the classic singularity.
Another question...how do photons “travel” then do they pass through some sort of “subspace” or another dimension to get to it’s destination?
there is no such thing as “time” in and of itself. “time” is delta kinetic energy. Don’t think so? Demonstrate a time event that is NOT a kinetic energy event.
I’d certainly never argue time with someone named timer. ;)
Ok, I have had a few beers……… If they claim that an outside observer cannot distinguish an object passing through the event horizon because “it will never pass over”, considering the effects of quantum mechanics. Where the object takes an infinite amount of time to pass over the event horizon, why would the observer be prevented from collecting any data from it assuming the observer would not be effected by the event itself? The only other question I want an answer to is, why is a duck?, and if so, why not?
From our perspective, they would redshift to the point we could no longer measure the light.
BECAUSE!
From a newtonian stand point, it is a little massless cannon ball that plods along at the speed of light unless, it interacts with something.
From a quantum standpoint, it is something entirely different that can only really be described by mathmatical formulas.
This is really fascinating stuff that makes my head spin. Do you have any links to some sites that explain quantum physics to dummies(if it can be done)? This stuff goes way beyond my college physics and math.
BECAUSE!
The event horizon, or the duck?
I wonder how many people world wide are following a conversation about a non-event, event horizon? (another question one beer later)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.