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First proof that "plunging regions" exist around black holes in space
- gigatexal 2y agoStill continues to amaze me that the more they look the more they confirm Einstein. Yet we know — or strongly suspect — that at the singularity and within the BH general relativity breaks down. I hope we see a unification of GR and Quantum mechanics in my lifetime. Would be really neat
- cdchn 2y agoNot to bring the all pervasive AI topic into this discussion, but I think the best hope we have for finding that unification depends on an AI superintelligence. I wonder if we've reached the limit of what a singular human mind can push.
- klyrs 2y ago> I wonder if we've reached the limit of what a singular human mind can push. You people are becoming zombies. Get away from your computer and interact with the world. Humans with profound intellect are producing the content that LLMs regurgitate for you.
- bisby 2y agoNo one mentioned LLMs. We know that there are things that computers can flat out do better than humans, because there are limits to human brains. If computers continue to grow in power, then the fact that someday there might be an AI (actual AI, not LLM) which can come up with novel solutions is totally plausible. And if we go past that point and computers continue to become more powerful, then it's likely that the AI will continue to grow and become more powerful as well. And if the AI eternally expands its thinking capabilities with time, then it will inevitably surpass humans one day. Do we need to get to that point to solve physics? Probably not. We're not at the limits of human ingenuity yet. But mentioning AI doesn't mean "I think LLMs in the next 3 months will solve everything!" either. No need to be so defensive about someone wistfully pondering about the limits of humanity.
- card_zero 2y agoNone of that is fact, or inevitable, or meaningful. What are "thinking capabilities", what are they made of? More RAM? A human can have more RAM, by installing it in the human's computer. More parallelism? Maybe, but that's like having more humans. More speed? It's not clear what you'd do with it, since research tends to involve interaction and the outside world has a pace of its own: sitting in a cell on amphetamines does not make you brilliant. More of some unknown component of the yet-to-be-discovered formula for intelligence? Maybe, if it even works that way, which is a massive assumption. I'm sorry, I'm not buying "superintelligence", outside of sci-fi plots. Even there it's kind of irritating deus ex machina stuff.
- Vampiero 2y agoI'd agree with what you're saying, but the jump to "not believing in superintelligence" doesn't make sense either. Are you implying that humans are the absolute peak of intelligence or that computers can't ever achieve something that is even just one iota better than human-level intelligence? There's one thing machines have that we don't: time. A human-level AI would be better than a human because you can ask it to solve a problem for years on end without ever resting.
- card_zero 2y agoI'm implying that intelligence doesn't have quantifiable levels, so I disagree with "peak" and "better" as concepts. I know we can become better at solving problems in a domain, often with the assistance of tools. But I think the bogeyman of "superintelligence" is just a human with better tools. Perhaps including a synthetic brain. I expect its smarts to be cultural, made of ideas, mediated by technology, as usual, and domain-dependent, as usual, and not frighteningly "super" for the culture it exists in. I anticipate AGI as a development of us. OK, so, maybe there are paradigm shifts to be reached that way, and maybe technology (familiarity with tools) will be crucial for these paradigm shifts which are the only way to understand certain new things intuitively. But, maybe this has been going on already, even before there were computers.
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- redundantly 2y agoI read their comment more as a nod to The Last Question than speaking about the recent "AI" in the news. https://archive.org/details/Science_Fiction_Quarterly_New_Series_v04n05_1956-11_slpn https://archive.org/details/Science_Fiction_Quarterly_New_Se... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Question https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Question
- Sakos 2y agoThen they should've made an explicit reference. As is, I don't see any indication that they're even aware that The Last Question exists and it sounds like every other LLM fanatic.
- redundantly 2y agoThe term AI has been around a heckuva lot longer than the current LLM hype. It's not unreasonable to make that assumption, to link it along the lines of what AI really means vs how the term has been used as of late.
- cdchn 2y agoYes, it was more along the lines of The Last Question, wasn't even thinking about LLM.
- MeImCounting 2y agoYes the LLM hype can be annoying. Equally if not more annoying is the smug disdain of those who criticize it. Even more annoying than that is people too caught up in "the world" and "serious matters" to read some sci-fi.
- klyrs 2y agoDon't get me wrong, I love reading and watching sci-fi! And actually, that's a great source of inspiration to keep my mind sharp; a superintelligence unleashed on our world today, with pathetically insecure networked listening devices in all of our pockets, a populace demonstrably manipulable through social media, etc; humanity has nothing but literal prayer to protect itself from actual superintelligence. Which isn't an actual defense, but hope feels nice. Let's be clear: what we have today is LLMs. Not superintelligence. When people drool over the promise of superintelligence, to the exclusion of curiosity about the problems we intelligent humans can solve, they've bought into a thought-terminating utopian fantasy. That's a dead brain, that will not help humanity progress. Zombies. Superintelligence, should it ever arise, is my enemy. The disdain that I have for its adherents is born of self-preservation. edit to add clarity regarding my admonition to experience "the world": whoever receives all of their knowledge from computer sources is readily replaced by an automaton with access to the same. Those of us who are curious about the world around us are capable of making observations yet to be recorded in electronic form. Be curious, my friend, or succumb to zombiehood.
- MeImCounting 2y agoAt the risk of repeating myself, yes the LLM hype is quite overdone and annoying. What you say is true people have bought into a fantasy which is wholly unrealistic. Unfortunately your view is altogether tiresome and much harder to scroll past than the juvenile LLM excitement because it could actually do some real harm in the long term. No 'The Terminator" was not a documentary, nor was "The Matrix" nor even is your favorite episode of "Black Mirror". Watts is far more eloquent than I could ever be on this subject matter. I highly recommend this article in The Atlantic by him and if you havent picked up any of his work I highly recommend pretty much anything hes ever written. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/03/ai-consciousness-science-fiction/677659/?gift=b1NRd76gsoYc6famf9q-8kj6fpF7gj7gmqzVaJn8rdg&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/03/ai-conscio...
- cdchn 2y agoThe idea for me comes less from AI than the slowdown, I think, of really ground breaking science. We're still proving Einstein's ideas, we haven't really moved much beyond Einstein.
- cdchn 2y agoThats the distinction I think between an LLM and a real AGI. One is a stochastic parrot, the other can come up with new ideas.
- klyrs 2y agoThe distinction I focus on is that one exists, while the other remains a futuristic pipedream.
- kitd 2y agoIt takes a singularity to comprehend a singularity?
- af78 2y agoAI or not, if a machine finds an answer so complex that no human can understand it, how useful is it?
- rthnbgrredf 2y agoDepends on whether we can instruct the AI to make something useful out of it. Today we have complex systems like CPUs that most humans don't understand.
- DonHopkins 2y agoOr an answer so simple: 42.
- ben_w 2y agoI don't see that as being an important objection, because from the point of view of any single human… that's already true for the expertise found only in other humans. I don't know the chemistry necessary to turn crude oil into any plastic, I don't know how to use a Lagrangian, I tried and failed to learn group theory (I've only got the basics, and I'm not confident about them), and I've still only got a toy model of special relativity (which is supposed to be the easier one) — and yet, not only are those all still useful, the four colour theorem is useful even though it's a non-surveyable proof: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-surveyable_proof https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-surveyable_proof
- cdchn 2y agoAbstractions are a thing. We use devices all the time that we don't understand entirely the workings of.
- z3phyr 2y agoPlease touch grass sir!
- tbrownaw 2y ago> I wonder if we've reached the limit of what a singular human mind can push. We passed that limit ages ago. The underlying technology used to do so is called "writing", which is what allows for things like libraries and letters / email and personal scratchpad notes.
- vbezhenar 2y agoIs it even scientific to claim anything about black hole insides? AFAIU it's impossible by definition for any information to escape black hole insides. Any observation or experiment is not possible. Any assumption can't be confirmed or rebuted. Basically it can't be falsified, so it's not a science according to Popper.
- chungy 2y agoWe can hypothesize, but there is no known way to ever test it. At least not with the information getting out of the black hole.
- kelseyfrog 2y agoWithout being able to test, the insides of blackholes are outside the realm of falsifiability and thus forever beyond science.
- sliken 2y agoMaybe, but if we found or made a tiny black hole, something could be beyond the event horizon just before it evaporates. Or maybe spin it fast enough so the singularity is visible.
- disconcision 2y ago> AFAIU it's impossible by definition for any information to escape black hole insides. Any observation or experiment is not possible this doesnt precisely follow. observation or experiment is possible from within the event horizon, although this might limit plausible venues for publication
- legohead 2y agoAnd the graphic on the page is the opposite of what they are describing...
- SiempreViernes 2y agoNo, the inner most stable orbit is just not very large which the graphics illustrate by the central black region around the black hole.
- ganzuul 2y agoWhy is it that some experts say stuff falls into the center of a black hole while others say it slows down and never passes the event horizon? Is it just semantics?
- anal_reactor 2y agoThe closer you are to the black hole the slower the time passes.
- zelphirkalt 2y agoWhy is that again? Falling in does not seem to imply accellerating towards the speed of light. Accellerating surely, but speed of light? Why would it?
- pests 2y agoFrame of reference. The object falling in experiences time as normal and actually falls in. From an outside observer they never cross the event horizon, due to the time dilation mentioned by the other comment.
- knodi123 2y ago> From an outside observer they never cross the event horizon, due to the time dilation mentioned by the other comment. Doesn't that imply that if we look at a black hole from a safe distance, the event horizon will appear to be a cluttered frozen motionless ring, full of all the stuff that is in the process of falling in but which from out point of view, never will?
- pests 2y agoAlmost, another detail is the closer the object gets to the event horizon, the more it's light redshifts - until it's no longer in the visible spectrum at all. You can think of the black hole's gravity as stealing energy from the light, shifting it into a lower energy spectrum.
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- SiempreViernes 2y agoHere's the paper: https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/531/1/366/7671518 https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/531/1/366/7671518 X-ray astronomers, how weird is it that they show their fits in physical space and not in instrument space?
- gravescale 2y ago> sufficiently close to a black hole it is impossible for particles to safely follow circular orbits. Health and safety gone mad! Weirdly, it's hard to actually find information about this using the phrase "plunging region", as if you search for it everyone is currently regurgitating the strange Oxford press release wording of "safely". Which is an ironic turn of phrase because the result of the plunge is falling into a black hole. Though I think they probably mean that the circular orbit itself would be safe, not that the particle is falling in deliberately to avoid orbiting in some unsafe manner within a circular orbit! But the Wikipedia article is actually pretty clear: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innermost_stable_circular_orbit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innermost_stable_circular_orbi.... So closer than 3 Schwarzschild radii, you can in theory have an circular orbit instantaneously, at a speed lower than light (until the photon sphere at 1.5Rs, where you have to orbit at c). If it was Newtonian rules, you could just orbit here. But because spacetime is warped inwards, anything actually in such an orbit will tip off the circular orbit and into a lower orbit, where it tips inwards and so on, into an inward spiral. It seems a bit like one of those coin spiral games/charity boxes where the coin spirals down a curved cone-like funnel into the central hole. Even a coin injected tangentially eventually falls in, because the continously curved inward slope of the surface always makes the coin turn inwards and resists a stable orbit (even if it had no friction or air resistance).