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Are Black Holes Actually Dark Energy Stars?
- chc 8y agoI've seen a couple of articles about this guy recently and they both struck me as weirdly credulous given the apparently complete lack of evidence supporting his theory and the fact that approximately no other scientists seem to find it credible.
- ChrisSD 8y agoAfter all the big discoveries (and personalities) of the 20th century, physics has seemed to be relatively quiet lately. So people are eager for the next big and dramatic change to our understanding. And that's what George Chapline is offering the pop sci press.
- diegoperini 8y agoIf what LIGO achieved is not loud enough for the 21st century, then we are probably doomed. It is a NEW kind of telescope that has not even been utilized for 1% of its potential. PS: I'm not arguing with your statement, you have all the right to think that way. Maybe even people who lived during Einstein's earlier times thought the same for their previous century.
- HalcyonicStorm 8y agoI would argue that one of the reasons why physics news has been quiet is because the state of the field has moved beyond a lay person's understanding at more than a high level.
- doombolt 8y agoIf you can't explain your idead to your janitor, you don't really grasp them yourself.
- HalcyonicStorm 8y agoI agree with your statement, but we're discussing physics reporting in the news. They are aiming for eyeballs and ad clicks, not for emanating understanding of the topic.
- doombolt 8y agoOne can read Wikipedia as well
- JackFr 8y agoOTOH... "Hell, if I could explain it to the average person, it wouldn't have been worth the Nobel prize." -- Richard Feynman
- admax88q 8y agoThe thing I hate about this statement is it gives people an excuse to ignore things they don't understand at first glace by claiming the presenter doesn't fully understand it so it's probably not true. Its a good standard to hold yourself to when explaining things to others. But not one to hold others to when explaining to you.
- whatshisface 8y ago"Be liberal in what you accept but conservative in what you generate."
- diegoperini 8y agoEven that is up to debate. https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2011/8/114933-the-robustness-principle-reconsidered/fulltext https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2011/8/114933-the-robustness-...
- vnorilo 8y agoIf you can successfully eli5, that indicates thorough mastery of a subject. Stuff on the bleeding edge of physics can be grasped by a limited group of experts, but nobody might have developed the 10th dan sensei level understanding yet. Maybe in 50 years we'll have great explanations of black holes and quantum mech that laypeople can grok.
- danarmak 8y agoFew non-physicists understand quantum mechanics even at a high level, but that certainly hasn't stopped journalists over the last hundred years. Whatever the new frontier is, I'm sure the popular media could cover it in technobabble just fine if they wanted to.
- maze-le 8y agoYes, and there are also neutrino telescopes. I wait for the detection of an high energy neutrino event from beyond the CMBR. I think the opportunity, our understanding of physics and technology give us right now are immense. The fact that general relativity and quantum mechanics havent been reconciled by now only means that this is probably a very hard thing to do. But it doesn't mean that 'phyics is dead'. [0]: https://icecube.wisc.edu/ https://icecube.wisc.edu/
- bacon_waffle 8y ago> I wait for the detection of an high energy neutrino event from beyond the CMBR My (non-physicist) understanding of this, is that neutrinos from then will be quite low energy now, due to the expansion of the universe(?), and so not detectable by the method IceCube uses. There is a minimum energy required, in part because the charged particles generated by the neutrino interaction need to be moving faster than the speed of light in water (or whatever the detection medium is) for there to be Cherenkov radiation generated and then detected. That said, I would love to see a response from a more knowledgeable person!
- whatshisface 8y agoThe neutrinos may start out with any energy, whatever produced them will determine that. To cross the great expanse of time and redshifting due to expansion and still have a lot of energy left, they would simply have to start out with a whole lot more. Any neutrino event that we could detect from that far away would probably be massive anyways, so maybe we'll see something.
- rsynnott 8y agoI think people have been predicting gravity wave telescopes for so long that when one finally showed up, it wasn’t that exciting to the press.
- bsder 8y ago> If what LIGO achieved is not loud enough for the 21st century, then we are probably doomed. The problem is that it is REALLY hard to describe to the layman just how excruciatingly difficult it is to do what LIGO does. I like to think that I know a thing or two about electrical engineering and quantum mechanics, and even I probably don't get just exactly how amazing LIGO is.
- njarboe 8y agoThe original paper on the first detection of a black hole merger by LIGO is really great[1]. It's even open access. Much of the paper is accessible to someone at the freshman physics level. Download the pdf as it is in a much nicer format than the online version. [1]https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.061102 https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.11...
- nikofeyn 8y agokip thorne's talks are really good about explaining ligo's importance. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxhp4GBr1Zg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxhp4GBr1Zg
- joe-collins 8y agoAt least at the pop-science level, his ideas connect a lot of dots. He'd neatly resolve the weirdness and mystery of black holes, their jets, their information paradox, and dark energy. It feels good. Whether or not any of it makes a lick of sense once you start actually crunching numbers is another question. The lack of interest from other scientists leaves me skeptical (even if I'm silently enamored of the neatness myself).
- Semiapies 8y agoYep. I've been hearing mentions of this guy's theories from pop science publications for years even though, as the article says, "The idea has found no support in the astrophysical community—over the last decade, Chapline’s papers on this topic have garnered only single-digit citations." The pop science press is depressingly bad.
- philipov 8y ago"Dark Energy Star" is pure marketing speak, and the pop science press loves sexy terms like that, whereas to serious physicists a hyphy phrase like that is going to throw all sorts of red flags, the same way an engineer would be appalled by someone boasting about Chaos Engineering. It's usually referred to as the Cosmological Constant instead.
- walru 8y agoI would much rather live in a world where this person may be heard than likewise. "Don't take refugee in the false security of consensus." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z2uzEM0ugY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z2uzEM0ugY
- czbond 8y agoNever trust credentials for "leaps and bounds thinking". Trust credentials for incremental, linear thinking....
- econnor 8y agoThere's a certain nominative-deterministic inevitability to all this. There are these things called black holes that apparently are a full of a lot of stuff and aren't completely understood. And there's this mysterious stuff called dark matter that has to exist but seems to be hiding. My mom would be yelling "'Come on guys, join the dots". And who would blame her.
- empath75 8y ago> The idea has found no support in the astrophysical community They put it pretty bluntly in the article.
- chc 8y agoThat's true, but the article as a whole still felt weirdly credulous to me. The reminders that this is a complete flight of fancy work out to like one or two clauses in a 1400-word article that devotes a lot of room to detailing his theory and repeatedly pointing out that it could theoretically be proven true someday. To this article's credit, though, it is more measured than others. Just as a whole it seems weird to me how much attention such a seemingly insignificant hypothesis is getting.
- franciscrick1 8y agoDid you want them to say "This guy is a crank!" several hundred times to fill up space? How are we ever supposed to learn anything new if everything is run through your hypothetical credibility filter first?
- Semiapies 8y agoIt's just an aside they throw out before going into how This One Maverick's ideas are so exciting. And ultimately, they're still writing yet another article on the idea because it sells.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- gcbw2 8y agotheoretic physics stoped being the 'weird-what-if-from-academia' to be the 'weird-what-if' in general
- jboggan 8y agoIt's interesting, original, and most importantly falsifiable. There will be real differences between the jets predicted by his theory and the commonly accepted model, I'm excited to see it tested. There's a moment at which every scientific theory is only thought credulous by a single person.
- everdev 8y ago> There's a moment at which every scientific theory is only thought credulous by a single person. Agreed, but the same is also true of any conspiracy theory or half-baked idea. The theory should be evaluated on it's merits, not the number of supporters. And theories that can be tested are always better than ones that can't IMO.
- mrpgraae 8y agoThe thing about conspiracy theories is that they are usually not falsifiable, at least not to their proponents. As jboggan mentions, this theory is both falsifiable and testable in practice. I think it's important that there are always a few people in science who go against the mainstream, as long as they do actual science, so falsifiable and testable theories.
- nabla9 8y agoRobert B. Laughlin (Nobel physicist mentioned in the article) has really unique viewpoint towards emergence vs reductionism. His book "A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down" is layman explanation of his ideas. Here is one of his recent papers: Emergent Relativity https://arxiv.org/pdf/gr-qc/0302028.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/gr-qc/0302028.pdf
- laretluval 8y agoFound an interesting technical summary/critique of these ideas https://motls.blogspot.com/2005/03/chapline-black-holes-dont-exist.html https://motls.blogspot.com/2005/03/chapline-black-holes-dont...
- qubex 8y agoPretty savage...
- 21 8y agoThis guy doesn't have all the screws properly tightened. Just saying...
- ddebernardy 8y agoLubos is interesting to read at times - even brilliantly enlightening at times. But keep in mind that he's an unapologetic ultra-conservative and climate change denier, as well as an occasional troll, in addition to being a reputable string physicist. He expresses stronger views than he probably should on no shortage of topics.
- PerryCox 8y agoHow likely is this to be the case over Black Holes?
- princekolt 8y agoNo one knows for sure. However it's good to have alternative models to look into if the observational data you eventually get (in this case from the EHT) doesn't match precisely with the mainstream model.
- hinkley 8y agoI managed to confuse myself into a Zeno’s paradox situation with how black holes grow. This is really exotic space. Time dialation immediately outside of the event horizon would make any matter fall so slow that it would take millions of years of time for an observer to see that material cross the horizon.
- nightcracker 8y agoNo snow ever "enters" a snowball, yet it grows.
- Chabs 8y agoOutside observers never see the material cross the horizon, ever. That's why it's called a horizon, you'll never reach it (from the pov of an outside observer). Growth-wise, you have to keep in mind that the black hole doesn't grow when matter crosses the horizon, but when the matter gets close enough to the horizon that mass of black hole + mass of new matter creates a blackhole of a larger radius that encompasses that matter.
- doombolt 8y agoHow would you ever observe black hole to grow/accreate matter then?
- qubex 8y agoInfalling matter or radiation becomes ‘simply’ infinitely red-shifted (on account of the slowed time), and hence undetectable to an external observer — and is hence indistinguishable from the bulk of the prior-existing “black hole proper”.
- mcbits 8y agoConversely, a particle on the surface of an object compressed to near its Schwarzschild radius should experience an extreme blue shift and time contraction. Imagine absorbing in one instant a billion years of microwave background radiation blue shifted to gamma and beyond. How could the near-black-hole hang onto it?
- hinkley 8y agoWe have people like string theorists thinking about higher dimensions in space. It occurred to me the other day when the dark matter article hit the front page that our equation for gravity works with three dimensions but those dimensions are uniform. I can turn an object with very little effort (literally without doing work) and it’s the same size from our perspective. How would it work if matter has more dimensions that aren’t proportional, or if space is curved in higher dimensions and the differences are in the noise floor here on earth and in orbit?
- gmmeyer 8y agoYea that's a part of the string theoretic calculation, that some of these higher dimensions are different than the three we're accustomed to. They're curved and swirled and weird. It's pretty unclear that they're real, but it's an interesting idea
- Arnavion 8y agoIndeed. The usual layman example is that a string has two dimensions when you're close enough to it that it resembles a cylinder, but only one when you zoom out far enough that it becomes a line.
- codethief 8y agoIt took me second to realize that you're talking about actual real-life strings, not the strings from string theory which are precisely 1-dimensional. :)
- gyrfalc 8y agoPBS Space Time did a recent episode on higher spacial dimensions and gravity. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HYw6vPR9qU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HYw6vPR9qU
- gcbw2 8y agoThe delivery on this program is extremely annoying and slow paced (and rushed on points that ought be slow). :(
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Sarki 8y agoOn another note a theory which seems to fit particularly well is called Janus. The concept lies in the existence of a twin universe (ours being matter based the twin being antimatter based) merged together where the black holes are basically where the antimatter is concentrated and thus repulses all the matter hence this seemingly void. This is a succint summary but I hope it makes sense to the more knowledgeable readers of HN.
- sorenn111 8y agoThe predominance of matter over antimatter I thought was explained by symmetry breaking at the ultra extreme conditions of early universe? Would there be a twin universe for other broken symmetries?
- teilo 8y agoSymmetry breaking is an explanation, but we don't know if it's the right explanation. It's just the best we have at present.
- Sarki 8y agoThat's what is explained in the Janus model, both universes coexist in the same space and are rejecting each other through gravity, matter "won" over antimatter only by a tiny bit but sufficient to allow large portions of matter to remain. Though the appearance of both at the early times of the universe was in beyond colossal amounts, both being annihilated by each other when they met. edit: typos
- Trombone12 8y agoThat makes no sense, black holes are like super much the opposite of a void. Further, repulsion is precisely the opposite of gravity.
- opportune 8y agoYeah you can interpret a Schwarzchild radius as a “void” in a certain sense (though more like a one-way dump) but a black hole is still very much a participant in the physics of our universe
- lottin 8y ago"The fabric of space-time" — I hear this a lot, but what does it mean? Does it mean that space and time are a "fabric"? What is such a fabric made of? The idea that space and time are actual objects, instead of intellectual constructs, has always struck me as wrong. (I'm not a physicist.)
- btmiller 8y agoFabric in the sense that you cannot travel across space without also traveling across time.
- sorenn111 8y agoFabric meaning that the two things (space and time) are not separate entities. Read some of the cool thought experiments underlying special relativity and you will see how the two are "woven" together :)
- philipov 8y agoIt's usually referred to as a fabric because in general relativity, spacetime is dynamic, as if it were on a fabric that could stretch and contract in response to the density of matter occupying it. This is where the rubber-sheet analogy comes from. As for what it is made of, that is one of the great open questions in theoretical physics right now, but also possibly where the analogy breaks down. Because of Lorentz Invariance (light travels at the same speed in all reference frames), it is hard to suppose that there is such a thing as "atoms of spacetime" from which it is made. However, because our world is cosmological and the big bang does actually pick out a preferred reference frame, Lorentz Invarience has to be approximate in some way. Because of cosmology and the breakdown of reductionism at plank scales, it seems that the notion of spacetime itself is approximate and needs to be replaced with something else. Some people are trying to derive spacetime from purely quantum mechanical notions, while other people are trying to find dual systems where spacetime and quantum mechanics emerge hand-in-hand. The two approaches I'm familiar involve either holography or purely geometric and combinatorial ideas where the principles of general relativity and quantum mechanics are outputs rather than assumptions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WECVq2YBduY&t=0s&index=9&list=PLOchmQOEwXhEIAnI-pyHQlrCnEhmxGnQD https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WECVq2YBduY&t=0s&index=9&lis...
- russdill 8y agoThis seems to try and make a parallel between neutron stars and his proposal of a "dark energy star". This uber-dense matter would stop matter from collapsing enough to form an event horizon. But there is a serious problem with this. If you measure the density of a black hole by using it's even horizon you'll find that the mass and event horizon do not scale together. For instance, calculated in this way, a galactic mass black hole has a density of only 200kg/m³.
- pmalynin 8y agoIt actually is true thought, that some supermassive blackholes have a density thats pretty close to that of water, and their event horizons are very very gentle.
- tibyat 8y agowhat is this filth?
- Trombone12 8y agoA article about "alternative" black holes without the word LIGO in it? Yeah, I'm gonna have to stop you right there and ask you to sell that snek oil somewhere else.
- stupidcar 8y agoIf the EHT analysis of Sagittarius A* supported this theory, that would surely it would have already leaked? It seems like it would be simply too incredible not to start circulating amongst researchers and then get out into the wider world.
- zoggenhoff 8y agoWhat is dark energy?
- sulam 8y agoWhen you sum up all the red shifts of a large piles of galaxies they are receding from us at speeds faster than can easily be explained using the Hubble model. One theory for this is a repulsive energy of a form we have not yet observed, dubbed "dark energy", which is purported to be causing accelerating expansion of the universe since the Big Bang. More here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_energy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_energy
- clubm8 8y agoI find the idea of a photo of a black hole more interesting than this dark energy star. It didn't seem to be mentioned in the article: when will this "Event Horizon Telescope" have enough data to show us an event horizon?
- codethief 8y agoFrom their blog[1]: > As the EHT team begins to analyze the 2017 data on Sgr A* and M 87 over the coming months, preliminary images will begin to emerge, and the searches for the signatures of orbiting material around the black holes will be conducted. It is the most exciting time of the project. [1] https://eventhorizontelescope.org/blog/eht-status-update-may-1-2018 https://eventhorizontelescope.org/blog/eht-status-update-may...
- macawfish 8y agoThe thing is, dark energy is only dark because it doesn't interact electromagnetically, whereas black holes are dark because the light gets trapped. So these are very different concepts. I think it's fair to say black holes are a kind of "star", but the concept of dark energy and dark matter are something else.
- chriswarbo 8y ago> dark energy is only dark because it doesn't interact electromagnetically That's certainly the case for dark matter. After decades of work we still don't know what it is, which has given the word "dark" the additional meaning of 'unknown'. When it comes to dark energy, I think it mostly implies this second meaning.
- scythe 8y agoThe big giant glaring hole in his theory is that the total mass of all the black holes in the Universe is WAY less than the amount of dark energy. It's like claiming that the Pacific Ocean was filled in by the Sacramento River. That's why scientists aren't taking it seriously.