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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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.
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.
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):
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.).
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:
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:
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:
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’.
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:
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:
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:
Supplemental notes:
Verse and Music:
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.
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.