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The “no black holes” uproar a week later

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Thumbnail for version as of 02:40, 8 September 2006
/Alain r

Further to “Hawking now says there are no black holes” and “the fallout,” New Scientist is calling it a “cosmological Wild West.”

As New Scientist tells it,

Hawking’s notion does away with a key part of a black hole – its event horizon. It sounds far out, and has been met with heated debate, but even if Hawking is wrong, his high-profile claim highlights the fact that efforts to solve the paradox have turned cosmology on its ear. Firewalls have turned this corner of physics into a cosmic Wild West: a strange frontier where black holes can take on the form of exotic stars, fuzzballs, time machines or iced wormholes (see “The firewall paradox”).

The pillars of theoretical physics – quantum mechanics and general relativity – are in a stand-off. One of them will have to blink if this paradox is to be undone.

Somewhere, Einstein and Bohr are playing chess by the pool …

See also: The Science Fictions series at your fingertips

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Comments
Unfortunately, the word, 'overwhelming', in our experience tends to imply a degree of discomfort, wherein our degree of appreciation is in some sense and in some degree, stifled by excess. To be overwhelmed in terms of the intensity of appreciation of the love and the beauty, while not being overwhelmed, in the even marginally-negative sense, I should imagine, is key to the sensational bliss of heaven; and I think the beauty may play a key role. Often(times - as many Americans, rather poetically would say...) 'small' can indeed by as immensely beautiful as 'majestic' and 'imposing'. The discomfort, the overwhelming, arising from an excess, does not seem to be the impression conveyed by the NDE'ers. Quite the contrary. They often say that they felt at home, evidently, in a quite literal sense.Axel
February 6, 2014
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Christians know that the current state of matter in Creation is, in reality, an intermediate state, and that its proper end, is as glorified matter. St Paul almost sounds like an animist in one passage, doesn't he? For the purposes of science, it would seem that this is a blessing, since, in any case, surely light (at its physical pole) would be the only recognizable feature, if any, of our current world that would lend itself to measurement n heaven; at least - in principle, if you were daft enough to want to do so in heaven, as one hilarious NDE'er 'boffin', a chemist, I believe, wanted to do. His NDE experience seemed to be a distinct 'outlier', though he seemed sincere enough. One might imagine that perhaps, the most intense feeling of love would not preclude an interest at some time or other in the quasi physical property of that light to someone who'd been a scientist on earth, although most NDE'ers suggest that the divine light would be off any kind of scale, effectively, I suppose, infinite. Yet, I'm inclined to believe that what makes the infinite, divine love that NDE'ers experience, according to their capacity, so uniquely entrancing and inexpressible is that it is integral with every conceivable form of the sublimest beauty, known to the senses and senses we don't yet even possess, in the people and objects, wherever a person turns. And that guy wanted to take a measurement of God's luminosity...; a living (not necessarily 'breathing' at that time) Mr Magoo.Axel
February 6, 2014
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In light of this dilemma that the two very different eternities present to us spiritually minded people, and the fact that Gravity is, in so far as we can tell, completely incompatible with Quantum Mechanics, it is interesting to point out a subtle nuance on the Shroud of Turin. Namely that Gravity was overcome in the resurrection event of Christ:
A Quantum Hologram of Christ's Resurrection? by Chuck Missler Excerpt: “You can read the science of the Shroud, such as total lack of gravity, lack of entropy (without gravitational collapse), no time, no space—it conforms to no known law of physics.” The phenomenon of the image brings us to a true event horizon, a moment when all of the laws of physics change drastically. Dame Piczek created a one-fourth size sculpture of the man in the Shroud. When viewed from the side, it appears as if the man is suspended in mid air (see graphic, below), indicating that the image defies previously accepted science. The phenomenon of the image brings us to a true event horizon, a moment when all of the laws of physics change drastically. http://www.khouse.org/articles/2008/847 THE EVENT HORIZON (Space-Time Singularity) OF THE SHROUD OF TURIN. - Isabel Piczek - Particle Physicist Excerpt: We have stated before that the images on the Shroud firmly indicate the total absence of Gravity. Yet they also firmly indicate the presence of the Event Horizon. These two seemingly contradict each other and they necessitate the past presence of something more powerful than Gravity that had the capacity to solve the above paradox. http://shroud3d.com/findings/isabel-piczek-image-formation
Personally, considering the extreme difficulty that many brilliant minds have had in trying to reconcile Quantum Mechanics and special relativity, (QED), with Gravity, I consider the preceding nuance on the Shroud of Turin to be a subtle, but powerful, evidence substantiating Christ's primary claim as to being our Savior from sin, death, and hell:
John 8:23-24 But he continued, "You are from below; I am from above. You are of this world; I am not of this world. I told you that you would die in your sins; if you do not believe that I am he, you will indeed die in your sins." G.O.S.P.E.L. – (the grace of propitiation) - poetry slam – video https://vimeo.com/20960385
Supplemental notes:
The absorbed energy in the Shroud body image formation appears as contributed by discrete values - Giovanni Fazio, Giuseppe Mandaglio - 2008 Excerpt: This result means that the optical density distribution,, can not be attributed at the absorbed energy described in the framework of the classical physics model. It is, in fact, necessary to hypothesize a absorption by discrete values of the energy where the 'quantum' is equal to the one necessary to yellow one fibril. http://cab.unime.it/journals/index.php/AAPP/article/view/C1A0802004/271 Particle Radiation from the Body - July 2012 - M. Antonacci, A. C. Lind Excerpt: The Shroud’s frontal and dorsal body images are encoded with the same amount of intensity, independent of any pressure or weight from the body. The bottom part of the cloth (containing the dorsal image) would have born all the weight of the man’s supine body, yet the dorsal image is not encoded with a greater amount of intensity than the frontal image. Radiation coming from the body would not only explain this feature, but also the left/right and light/dark reversals found on the cloth’s frontal and dorsal body images. http://www.academicjournals.org/sre/PDF/pdf2012/30JulSpeIss/Antonacci.pdf Scientists say Turin Shroud is supernatural - December 2011 Excerpt: After years of work trying to replicate the colouring on the shroud, a similar image has been created by the scientists. However, they only managed the effect by scorching equivalent linen material with high-intensity ultra violet lasers, undermining the arguments of other research, they say, which claims the Turin Shroud is a medieval hoax. Such technology, say researchers from the National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development (Enea), was far beyond the capability of medieval forgers, whom most experts have credited with making the famous relic. "The results show that a short and intense burst of UV directional radiation can colour a linen cloth so as to reproduce many of the peculiar characteristics of the body image on the Shroud of Turin," they said. And in case there was any doubt about the preternatural degree of energy needed to make such distinct marks, the Enea report spells it out: "This degree of power cannot be reproduced by any normal UV source built to date." http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/scientists-say-turin-shroud-is-supernatural-6279512.html
Verse and Music:
Colossians 1:15-20 The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross. Natalie Grant - Alive (Resurrection music video) Lyric “Death has lost and Love has won!” http://www.godtube.com/watch/?v=KPYWPGNX
bornagain77
February 5, 2014
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Well, to borrow Tipler's term (but not his ideas), in so far as the "Physics of Immortality" are concerned, I've found black holes to lend strong support for the Theistic contention of eternal life after death. In Theism, particularly Christian Theism, it is held there are two ultimate destinies for our eternal souls. Heaven or Hell! And in physics we find two very different 'eternities' just as Theism has held for millenia. One eternity in physics is found 'if' a hypothetical observer were to accelerate to the speed of light. In this scenario time, as we understand it, would come to a complete stop for the hypothetical observer. To grasp the whole 'time coming to a complete stop at the speed of light' concept a little more easily, imagine moving away from the face of a clock at the speed of light. Would not the hands on the clock stay stationary as you moved away from the face of the clock at the speed of light? Moving away from the face of a clock at the speed of light happens to be the same 'thought experiment' that gave Einstein his breakthrough insight into e=mc2.
Albert Einstein - Special Relativity - Insight Into Eternity - 'thought experiment' video http://www.metacafe.com/w/6545941/ "I've just developed a new theory of eternity." Albert Einstein - The Einstein Factor - Reader's Digest - 2005
Some may think that time, as we understand it, coming to a complete stop at the speed of light is pure science fiction, but, as incredible as it sounds, Einstein's infamous thought experiment has many lines of evidence now supporting it.
Velocity time dilation tests http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_dilation#Velocity_time_dilation_tests "The laws of relativity have changed timeless existence from a theological claim to a physical reality. Light, you see, is outside of time, a fact of nature proven in thousands of experiments at hundreds of universities. I don’t pretend to know how tomorrow can exist simultaneously with today and yesterday. But at the speed of light they actually and rigorously do. Time does not pass." Richard Swenson - More Than Meets The Eye, Chpt. 12
This following confirmation of time dilation is my favorite since they have actually caught time dilation on film (of note: light travels approximately 1 foot in a nanosecond (billionth of a second) whilst the camera used in the experiment takes a trillion pictures a second):
Amazing --- light filmed at 1,000,000,000,000 Frames/Second! - video (so fast that at 9:00 Minute mark of video you can briefly see the time dilation effect of relativity caught on film!) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_9vd4HWlVA
This higher dimension, 'eternal', inference for the time framework of light is also warranted, by logic, because light is not 'frozen within time', i.e. light appears to move to us in our temporal framework of time, yet it is shown that time, as we understand it, does not pass for light. The only way this is possible is if light is indeed of a higher dimensional value of time than our temporal time is otherwise it would simply be 'frozen in time'. Another line of evidence that supports the inference that 'tomorrow can exist simultaneously with today and yesterday', at the 'eternal' speed of light, is visualizing what would happen if a hypothetical observer were to approach the speed of light. Please note, at the 3:22 minute mark of the following video, when the 3-Dimensional world ‘folds and collapses’ into a tunnel shape as a 'hypothetical' observer moves towards the ‘higher dimension’ of the speed of light, (Of note: This following video was made by two Australian University Physics Professors with a supercomputer.).
Approaching The Speed Of Light - Optical Effects - video http://www.metacafe.com/watch/5733303/
Moreover, we have 'observational' evidence that corroborates what our physics is telling us in that people who have had deep Judeo-Christian Near Death Experiences (NDEs) report both 'eternity' and traveling through the tunnel to a higher dimension:
'Earthly time has no meaning in the spirit realm. There is no concept of before or after. Everything - past, present, future - exists simultaneously.' - Kimberly Clark Sharp - NDE Experiencer "I started to move toward the light. The way I moved, the physics, was completely different than it is here on Earth. It was something I had never felt before and never felt since. It was a whole different sensation of motion. I obviously wasn't walking or skipping or crawling. I was not floating. I was flowing. I was flowing toward the light. I was accelerating and I knew I was accelerating, but then again, I didn't really feel the acceleration. I just knew I was accelerating toward the light. Again, the physics was different - the physics of motion of time, space, travel. It was completely different in that tunnel, than it is here on Earth. I came out into the light and when I came out into the light, I realized that I was in heaven." Barbara Springer - Near Death Experience - The Tunnel - video https://vimeo.com/79072924
Moreover, as with special relativity, in General Relativity we find that temporal time slows down the further down in a gravitational well a person is:
Gravitational time dilation tests http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_dilation#Gravitational_time_dilation_tests
As well, as with any observer accelerating to the speed of light, it is found that for any 'hypothetical' observer falling to the event horizon of a black hole, that time, as we understand it, will come to a complete stop for them. This is because the accelerative force of gravity at black holes is so intense that not even light can escape its grip:
Space-Time of a Black hole - video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0VOn9r4dq8
But of particular interest to the ‘eternal framework’ found for General Relativity at black holes;… It is interesting to note that entropic decay (Randomness/Chaos), which is the primary reason why things grow old and eventually die in this universe, is found to be greatest at black holes. Thus the ‘eternity of time’ at black holes can rightly be described as ‘eternities of decay and/or eternities of destruction’.
Entropy of the Universe - Hugh Ross - May 2010 Excerpt: Egan and Lineweaver found that supermassive black holes are the largest contributor to the observable universe’s entropy. They showed that these supermassive black holes contribute about 30 times more entropy than what the previous research teams estimated. http://www.reasons.org/entropy-universe Roger Penrose – How Special Was The Big Bang? “But why was the big bang so precisely organized, whereas the big crunch (or the singularities in black holes) would be expected to be totally chaotic? It would appear that this question can be phrased in terms of the behaviour of the WEYL part of the space-time curvature at space-time singularities. What we appear to find is that there is a constraint WEYL = 0 (or something very like this) at initial space-time singularities-but not at final singularities-and this seems to be what confines the Creator’s choice to this very tiny region of phase space."
i.e. Black Holes are found to be ‘timeless’ singularities of destruction and disorder rather than singularities of creation and order such as the extreme order we see at the creation event of the Big Bang. Needless to say, the implications of this ‘eternity of destruction’ should be fairly disturbing for those of us who are of a ‘spiritually minded' persuasion! It is also interesting to note that Gravity, despite intense effort, refuses to be unified with Quantum Mechanics:
Theories of the Universe: Quantum Mechanics vs. General Relativity Excerpt: The first attempt at unifying relativity and quantum mechanics took place when special relativity was merged with electromagnetism. This created the theory of quantum electrodynamics, or QED. It is an example of what has come to be known as relativistic quantum field theory, or just quantum field theory. QED is considered by most physicists to be the most precise theory of natural phenomena ever developed. In the 1960s and '70s, the success of QED prompted other physicists to try an analogous approach to unifying the weak, the strong, and the gravitational forces. Out of these discoveries came another set of theories that merged the strong and weak forces called quantum chromodynamics, or QCD, and quantum electroweak theory, or simply the electroweak theory, which you've already been introduced to. If you examine the forces and particles that have been combined in the theories we just covered, you'll notice that the obvious force missing is that of gravity. http://www.infoplease.com/cig/theories-universe/quantum-mechanics-vs-general-relativity.html
bornagain77
February 5, 2014
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