EINSTEIN ZOMBIE WORLD IS GETTING SUSPICIOUS

http://www.crosswalk.com/blogs/rnicoll/11556830/
"The multiverse: a theory in trouble...It appears that those cosmic
gluttons called "black holes" may be a figment of physicists'
imagination.....General relativity is one of the twin pillars upon
which all physics rests (the other is quantum mechanics). Since black
holes are thought a necessary consequence of relativity, part of their
"cash value" comes from their confirmation of this highly celebrated
theory. In the minds of theorists, black holes and general relativity
are inextricably linked. To question either is tantamount to a
Christian questioning the bodily resurrection of Christ.....The
related phenomena of wormholes and time-tunneling are seen as portals
to exploration and understanding....Many-worlds is the thematic thread
in films like Johnny Darko, Run Lola Run and What the Bleep Do We
Know? Much of its appeal can be attributed to the growing influence of
Eastern mysticism combined with the popular notion that science will
save us. Nevertheless, most mainline physicists have dismissed the
theory as transcendental science.....Arguably, the most sophisticated
multiverse theory belongs to Smolin. Lee Smolin is a physicist who has
a deep admiration for Darwin's theory of natural selection.....In
contrast, Smolin's supercosmos is a product of common descent from a
primordial granddaddy.....Clearly, Smolin's energetic effort to keep
naturalism afloat rises or falls on the validity of black holes.
However recent developments indicate that it is a mere shifting of
deck chairs on the Titanic.....Stephen Hawking shocked his colleagues
by reversing his 30-year position. In a 2004 conference in Ireland,
Dr. Hawking presented the results of his latest calculations before
concluding: "I'm sorry to disappoint science fiction fans, but if
[mass and energy] is preserved [as required by the laws of physics]
there is no possibility of using black holes to travel to other
universes.'' Flash! The most celebrated scientist of our day ceded
that black holes are not portals to other worlds. That was bad news
enough....This has caused a growing number of scientists to reconsider
the viability of many-worlds, despite its outrageous extravagance and
its logical extensions into mysticism. To be sure, these are desperate
times for the philosophical naturalist."

Some day Einstein zombie world may even discover that Smolin's,
Hawking's etc. idiocies are simply camouflaging a truth that can be
extracted from the following two confessions:

Albert Einstein: "If the speed of light is the least bit affected by
the speed of the light source, then my whole theory of relativity and
theory of gravity is false."

Albert Einstein: "I consider it entirely possible that physics cannot
be based upon the field concept, that is on continuous structures.
Then nothing will remain of my whole castle in the air, including the
theory of gravitation, but also nothing of the rest of contemporary
physics."

Pentcho Valev

On 16 Oct, 07:03, Pentcho Valev wrote:
[snip crap]

Pentcho Valev

Nobody gives a ****

On Oct 16, 2:03 am, Pentcho Valev wrote:
Stephen Hawking shocked his colleagues
by reversing his 30-year position. In a 2004 conference in Ireland,
Dr. Hawking presented the results of his latest calculations before
concluding: "I'm sorry to disappoint science fiction fans, but if
[mass and energy] is preserved [as required by the laws of physics]
there is no possibility of using black holes to travel to other
universes.'' Flash! The most celebrated scientist of our day ceded
that black holes are not portals to other worlds. That was bad news
enough....

Damn! There goes my ticket to Einstein Zombie World.

From: Pentcho Valev
It appears that those cosmic gluttons called "black holes" may be
a figment of physicists' imagination...

That's only a half truth. Here's how I understand the situation:
Due to time dilation as an object approaches a deep gravitational
well, a falling object experiences only a finite (and small)
passage of time all the way down, but in fact for a black hole the
gravitational well would be infinitely deep and take forever to
fall to the event horizon. In fact the event horizon is never
formed because as the mass of the neutron star approches black-hole
quantity, the gravititational well gets arbitrarily deep, and the
last particle that would push the mass past the limit can never
quite reach the bottom of the well. So nothing ever goes into a
true black hole, just a neutron star with enough stuff falling
toward it to become a black hole but the final stuff never getting
there.

So what happens to everything that started falling too late to ever
reach the neutron star? It experiences only a finite amount of
passage of time, but the Universe outside the gravity well
experiences an unlimited amount of time. While the stuff is falling
down, still falling, the outside Universe experiences the
following:
- Dark energy causes all non-gravitationally-bound pairs of
objects, such as two nearby galaxy clusters, to pass each
other's event horizon, so that they can never again be casually
connected. All that are left are gravitationally bound clusters
of galaxies and their associated gravitationally bound
extra-gallactic gas.
- All the galaxies within each cluster merge into a single galaxy.
- The black holes within the several galaxies merge to a single
black hole within the single galaxy.
- All the free gas and dust is scattered either into the black hole
or beyond the dark-energy event horizon.
- All the stars die out, and with no dust there are no new stars formed.
- All the protons decay. The resultant electrons and positrons
scatter either into the black hole or beyond the dark-energy
event horizon.
- The lone black hole, isolated from everything else that was in
its Universe, now experiences absolutely zero external
temperature, so Hawking radiation gradually removes one particle
after another over immense time. Any particle which reaches
escape speed passes across the dark-energy event horizon never
to have a chance to scatter back.
- Any physical object that had been falling into the gravity well
all this time has by now been blasted by so much Hawking
radiation that it's surely decomposed into fundamental
particles. Because of time dilation, its protons haven't yet
decayed into leptons.
- One by one, these fundamental particles which have been falling
into the gravity well will be smashed apart by Hawking radiation
to yield only leptons, which will be gradually radiated away.
Thus these particles, will have in a very small finite amount of
their relativistic time, have gone from a big galaxy into what
was supposed to be a black hole but have now been re-radiated
back out into an utterly empty local Universe, with nothing in
it except one sorta black hole and one particle (self), and
shortly will fly past the event horizon of that sorta black
hole, and the sorta black hole will be alone again.
- One problem: The original neutron star that had grown almost
massive enough to form a true black hole has been compressed so
tightly that all notion of regular particles has been destroyed.
But now that the mass of the whole gravitational well is
evaporating via Hawking radiation, eventually we have a paradox,
the mass of the crushed neutron star by itself is greater than
the total mass of the entire gravitational well containing that
neutron star. Does anybody know how to resolve this?

the most sophisticated multiverse theory belongs to Smolin. Lee
Smolin is a physicist who has a deep admiration for Darwin's
theory of natural selection.....In contrast, Smolin's supercosmos
is a product of common descent from a primordial
granddaddy.

I prefer past-immortal perpetual inflation. There never was a
beginning. There has always been inflation.

Also, Darwon's theory has selection actually getting rid of unfit
individuals and hence gradually weeding out bad allelles. But
there's no mechanism to weed out universes. There's only the
Anthropic principle, whereby all those other Universes are still
out there, but we can't see them because we're in one of the very
rare Universes that can support life.

Stephen Hawking shocked his colleagues by reversing his 30-year
position. In a 2004 conference in Ireland, Dr. Hawking presented
the results of his latest calculations before concluding: "I'm
sorry to disappoint science fiction fans, but if [mass and energy]
is preserved [as required by the laws of physics] there is no
possibility of using black holes to travel to other universes.''
Flash! The most celebrated scientist of our day ceded that black
holes are not portals to other worlds.

That's not a surprise. After all, how can anybody survive being
crushed by unbounded intensity of gravitational stretching?
Even if your particles ended up somewhere else, who cares??
(Actually it's even worse: High-energy collisions destroy even your
fundamental particles, producing new particles of random type
consistent with total energy available. You do know about "atom
smashers", right? You've seen photos of cloud/bubble chambers?)

This has caused a growing number of scientists to reconsider
the viability of many-worlds, ...

That's a silly way to think. The math says the other Universes are
out there, but they're casually disconnected from our Universe, so
they are moot to our existance and future, but important for
explaining our far distant path in the context of a general theory
of Cosmology.

Albert Einstein: "If the speed of light is the least bit affected
by the speed of the light source, then my whole theory of
relativity and theory of gravity is false."

So far not the slightest discrepancy has been observed, for example
the energy emitted by the approaching and receding blast fronts of
a supernova arrive here at exactly the same time as best we can
determine observationally. We see the redshifted and blueshifted
light at almost exactly the same time, differing only by the extra
transit time of the redshifted light from the far side across to
the front side. Now I admit we don't yet have any way to detect
really small differences in speed of light arrival, so keep
watching the skies!

Albert Einstein: "I consider it entirely possible that physics cannot
be based upon the field concept, that is on continuous structures.
Then nothing will remain of my whole castle in the air, including the
theory of gravitation, but also nothing of the rest of contemporary
physics."

Field theory is just an approximation, a very good approximation,
to whatever guage theory is the correct theory, probably using a
Hamiltonian type of geometry instead of a fixed grid, to include
general relativity as nothing but an approximation to what's really
going on in the model.

Dear Robert Maas:

"Robert Maas, see http://tinyurl.com/uh3t"
wrote in message ...
From: Pentcho Valev
It appears that those cosmic gluttons called "black
holes" may be a figment of physicists' imagination...

That's only a half truth. Here's how I understand
the situation: Due to time dilation as an object
approaches a deep gravitational well, a falling
object experiences only a finite (and small)
passage of time all the way down,

Sorry, no. This stuff is freely available, it is amazing that
some seem to diet entirely on crank websites.

The time that an infaller sees for crossing the event horizon is
finite. However it is on the order of the time the distant
observer would see the infaller reach the photon sphere. The
fact that the light from actual crossing "never" exits is
unsurprising, and not an indication that mass "never enters" or
is somehow frozen at the horizon.

http://hermes.physics.adelaide.edu.a...ack_holes.html
http://hermes.physics.adelaide.edu.a...k_gravity.html
http://hermes.physics.adelaide.edu.a...s/fall_in.html
http://hermes.physics.adelaide.edu.a...lack_fast.html
http://hermes.physics.adelaide.edu.a...s/hawking.html
http://hermes.physics.adelaide.edu.a...info_loss.html
http://hermes.physics.adelaide.edu.a.../universe.html
http://cosmology.berkeley.edu/Education/BHfaq.html

Not that I expect actual facts to sway your opinion at all.

David A. Smith

From: "N:dlzc D:aol T:com \(dlzc\)"
This stuff is freely available, it is amazing that some seem to
diet entirely on crank websites.

I'm not one of those people. I read various books/articles by
Asimov and other respectable science writers, and articles in
Science. And based on what I read, I try to make sense out of it
all. The main problem for me has been time reversibility for
geodesics and other paths. But (see late) I think I may have
finally resolved this problem.

The time that an infaller sees for crossing the event horizon is finite.

Agreed.

However it is on the order of the time the distant observer would
see the infaller reach the photon sphere.

What do you mean by "see"??

The fact that the light from actual crossing "never" exits is
unsurprising, and not an indication that mass "never enters" or
is somehow frozen at the horizon.

I never claimed anything is frozen at the event horizon, merely
that spacetime is stretched in a non-Euclidean manner such that
it's a very long distance down into a black hole, almost like a
(fictional) "tardis" from Dr. Who TV show, where the inside
dimension is larger than the outside dimension. In two dimensions
it's very easy to imagine, in fact the Simpson's halloween episode
where Homer finds a secret passage behind a bookcase and falls into
a gridlike representation of a black hole is somewhat realistic
(except for Homer's image itself *not* being tidally stretched into
a thin ribbon). If you measure the total distance down one side of
the stretched time-space well and back out the other side, that's
orders of magnitude longer than the distance around the gravity
well avoiding the deep part. You can even do that with an ant
crawling across a physical water-well, shorter distance to go
around than to go down and across and back up.

With spacetime stretched very far just for a neutron star not quite
massive enough to form a black hole, where the Simpson/ant metaphor
applies nicely, maybe as the mass approches enough to form a black
hole the stretching of spacetime is unbounded, the physical depth
of the hole extends faster than any object can fall towards the
event horizon, so the very last particle to fall in, the one which
*forms* the black hole, falls forever never reaching the receding
event horizon.

http://hermes.physics.adelaide.edu.a...k_gravity.html
virtual particles aren't confined to the interiors of light cones:
they can go faster than light!

That sounds crank to me!

http://hermes.physics.adelaide.edu.a...s/hawking.html
... you'll find Hawking radiation explained
this way in a lot of "pop-science" treatments:
Virtual particle pairs are constantly being created near the
horizon of the black hole, as they are everywhere. Normally, they
are created as a particle-antiparticle pair and they quickly
annihilate each other. But near the horizon of a black hole, it's
possible for one to fall in before the annihilation can happen, in
which case the other one escapes as Hawking radiation.

Yes, that's my understanding.

In fact this argument also does not correspond in any clear way to the
actual computation. Or at least I've never seen how the standard
computation can be transmuted into one involving virtual particles
sneaking over the horizon,

That's a strawman rebuttal. Nothing in the "pop science" account
says anything "sneaks" over the event horizon. The virtual
particles are created *outside* (but very near) the event horizon.
One particle falls inside, the other doesn't. The one that doesn't
fall inside was created outside in the first place so it doesn't
need to "sneak" outside. See my ideas later below for more about
this.

Now when we are in good old flat Minkowski spacetime, a la special
relativity, there are a bunch of "inertial frames" differing by
Lorentz transformations. These give different time co-ordinates, but
one can check that the difference is never so bad that different
co-ordinates give different notions of positive or negative frequency
solutions of Maxwell's equations. Nor will different people using
these co-ordinate systems ever disagree about what's the lowest-energy
state. So all inertial observers agree about what's a particle,
what's an antiparticle, and what's the vacuum.

That sounds right so I'll trust it.

But in curved spacetime there aren't these "best" co-ordinate systems,
the inertial ones. So even very reasonable different choices of
co-ordinates can give disagreements about particles vs antiparticles,
or what's the vacuum.

OK.

Now in fact when you do a Bogoliubov transformation to the vacuum you
get a state in which there are pairs of particles and antiparticles,
so this is possibly the link between the math and the heuristic
explanation.

OK, so I'll stick with the heuristic explanation as probably correct enough.

http://hermes.physics.adelaide.edu.a...info_loss.html
In order to understand why the information loss problem is a problem,
we need first to understand what it is. Take a quantum system in a
pure state and throw it into a black hole. Wait for some amount of
time until the hole has evaporated enough to return to its mass
previous to throwing anything in. What we start with is a pure state
and a black hole of mass M. What we end up with is a thermal state
and a black hole of mass M.

I don't see a problem here. In general, entropy increases. Black
holes simply do this on an immense scale. What am I missing?

In technical jargon, the black hole has performed a non-unitary
transformation on the state of system. As you may recall, non-unitary
evolution is not allowed to occur naturally in a quantum theory
because it fails to preserve probability, ie, after non-unitary
evolution, the sum of the probabilities of all possible outcomes of an
experiment may be greater or less than 1.

I dispute that! I'd say that black holes in effect provide a
special type of non-unitary transformation which is restricted to
total of probabilities staying exactly at 1. This is analagous to
saying that local rotation always preserves latitude and longitude
and elevation, but linear motion may change it. But a restricted
type of linear motation may nevertheless happen to preserve both
latitude and altitude, changing only longitude, and another
restricted type of linear motion may happen to preserve longitude
while changing both altitude and latitude, etc. Linear motation
*allows* change in all three of latitude and longitude and
elevation, but doesn't *require* it, might change only one or two
of the three. If you only care about one of the three, we say that
it may or may not be changed. Likewise non-unitary transformation
*allows* violation of total probabilities but doesn't require it.
In the case of entry to black hole followed by Hawking radiation of
equivalent total mass, that "allowed" violation per the
mathematical definition of non-unitary transformation doesn't
actually occur.

Actually this whole topic sounds fishy to me, since ordinary
absorbtion of photons to increase internal temperature followed by
ordinary blackbody radiation does in fact thermalize the
surrounding space by converting information to entropy.

Two notes to finish off. First, you might think that the thermal
nature of the black hole is inevitable since it is radiating, but you
would be wrong. In most of these quantum radiation calculations, the
spectrum of the radiation does not have a Planck spectrum. If that
had been the case for black holes, too, then we would not be able to
assign a temperature or an entropy to black holes. In that case,
people probably still would not believe Bekenstein and instead of the
information loss paradox we'd still be wondering how to reconcile
black holes with the second law. The thermal spectrum of Hawking
radiation is one of the most serendipitous results in modern physics,
in my opinion, which is another way of saying that something deep and
not understood is going on.

I assume what's called "Planck spectrum" above is the same as
what's usually called "blackbody spectrum" or "the spectrum of
blackbody radiation" or as below:
Linkname: Planck's law - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_body_radiation
Planck's law describes the spectral radiance of electromagnetic
radiation at all wavelengths from a black body ...
Correct me if those aren't all the same spectrum expressed in different words.

Anyway, the equivalance between blackbody spectrum and Hawking
spectrum doesn't seem at all surprising to me if both are related
to the Casimir spectrum of the vacuum:
Linkname: Conjectured derivation of the Planck radiation spectrum from Casimir energies
URL: http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/0305-4470/36/26/313/
(This turned up earlier in my Google search for "Planck spectrum",
before I found the WikiPedia article.)

http://hermes.physics.adelaide.edu.a.../universe.html
My reading of this article is that the properties of the event
horizon of a black hole comes not just from the static mass within
it but also from the momentum of stuff falling into it, and if
enough mass were *leaving* it (on some a priori basis) it might not
be a black hole at all but a white hole instead, like the Big Bang.
Perhaps this is the resolution to the paradox of the last moment of
a black hole evaporating via Hawking radiation, that the momentum
of Hawking radiation exceeds the internal mass, so for a brief
final moment it becomes a white hole?

The major assumption of the FRW cosmologies is that the universe is
homogeneous and isotropic on large scales. That is to say that it
looks the same everywhere and in every direction at any given
cosmological time. There is good astronomical evidence that the
distribution of galaxies is fairly homogeneous and isotropic on scales
larger than a few hundred million light years. The high level of
isotropy of the cosmic background radiation (CBR) is strong supporting
evidence for homogeneity.

This whole article sounds like it was written before Guth conceived
of the idea of inflation. Now the explanation of our current almost
exactly homogeneous and isotropic universe is that shortly-pre-inflation
there was enough cross-communication to smooth it out, and then
inflation expanded one local very-flat region, fudged only by
quantum fluctuations, to be of macroscopic size, which eventually
expanded to megalightyear size. The very-pre-inflation Universe
needn't have been either isotropic or homogenous.

It follows that the time reversal of this model for a collapsing
sphere of dust is indistinguishable from the FRW models if the dust
sphere is larger than the observable universe. In other words, we
cannot rule out the possibility that the universe is a very large
white hole. Only by waiting many billions of years until the edge of
the sphere comes into view could we know.

No question this *was* written before Dark Energy was discovered!!
Not only will we never get a chance to see stuff that is already
past or local event horizon, but even stuff we can see now will
eventually dark-energy-inflate beyond our future local event
horizon so we will never again get to see it.
We ain't never gonna see that edge of that sphere!!!

Not that I expect actual facts to sway your opinion at all.

Um, calculations from G.R. by Schwarzschild do not constitute *facts*.
The best conclusive *fact* I've read about regarding black holes is
that hot gas radiating X-rays in orbit near the "lowest stable
orbit" gradually decays until it actually reaches that "lowest
stable orbit", then within a fraction of a second it completely
disappears somehow, per the calculation of what would happen if its
orbit were no longer stable, due to downward frame dragging toward
the event horizon of a black hole. (Actually due to redshifting and
delay of light coming out the gravity well, what happens is that
its radiance is decreased and redshifted so that the "last photon"
gets out to "lowest stable orbit" distance within a fraction of a
second after the emitting object drops below that orbit, and then
our time-delayed view thousands of lightyears away sees those two
events a fraction of a second apart. Theoretically it *could* emit
a few more photons, redshifted to very very low energy, which get
out millions to billions of years later, but we won't notice any of
them.)

Now as to why the Subject field change, and in fact why I bothered
to respond at all: This morning I awoke early with a new idea about
black holes. The first part below was merely outlined in my
half-awake state, and being fleshed out now, while the rest below
was almost fully written a few minutes later. All of that early
morning stuff was before I read the articles you cited above.

One basic principle of physics is that geodesics are reversible,
light travels the same speed in all directions, in fact all paths
of objects are reversible, if we take time-mirror image of any
action we get another thing that could really happen.

According to that principle, any geodesic or other path that goes
toward a black hole could be time-reversed to yield a path coming
out of a black hole. The only way to explain that things go in but
never come out is that it takes forever to go in, because the
gravity well is infinitely deep, so things never finish falling in,
and before anything can come out it must have traveled for an
infinitely long time, which is impossible because the black hole
itself has been around at most 13.7 billion years (actually much
smaller in most cases).

But I realized this morning that that principle isn't correct!!!
Light falls into a well faster than it comes out. This is because
frame dragging happens not only rotationally around a rotating
mass, but also downward due to the static mass. What about
Michaelson-Morley type of experiments? They weren't accurate enough
to detect either type of frame dragging. New orbiting satellites
*have* verified frame dragging caused by rotation. But what about
the special relativity conclusion that light travels the same speed
in all directions? That applies only to inertial frames. If you're
sitting flat on Earth, not freefalling, held up by the Earth's
surface, you're *not* in an inertial frame, light is being dragged
downward by the frames. But the effect is so small we can't
presently measure it.

Update: One of those articles you cited had a "Red Queen race"
metaphor. It failed to mention frame dragging, but otherwise it
looks correct. At the event horizon, the frame is being dragged
downward so rapidly that the theoretical event horizon has to climb
at the speed of light just to stay in-place per outside
measurements. So because of frame dragging, there's no such thing
as a static black hole in the sense of time-reversible geodesics.
Frames are being dragged into the black hole all the time, and the
constant speed of light and SOL limit on all other speeds is
relative to these dragged frames, not relative to any sort of
classical fixed frame around the black hole.

Summary: Two kinds of frame dragging, rotational/momentum (follows
the physical motion) and static (always toward masses, never away).

An implication of this is that *no* particle interaction type is
exactly time-symmetric, because of static frame dragging. There's
no such thing as an inertial frame sitting at rest with respect to
a particle. Non-rotating frames near a particle (with mass) are
always being dragged towards that particle. As a result, the laws
of physics, which determine how particles interchange quantum
properties such as charge and boson number, are slightly assymetric
going in vs. coming out. This implies that the overall reaction
isn't exactly time-symmetric.

Now back to the issue of black holes. We have a slight dilemma that
somehow the mass of a black hole escapes it via Hawking radiation,
despite the fact that there's an event horizon preventing the mass
from escaping. Somebody wrote that virtual particles can exceed the
speed of light. I don't accept that. Here's my explanation I wrote
this morning:

So when spontaneous particle/antiparticle pair is created out of
gravitational potential energy, and one of pair falls back in while
other of pair escapes ("Hawking radiation"), thereby actually reducing
the mass of the black hole, how does that mass actually escape across
the event horizon given that it's impossible for anything to escape?
Answer: Virtual negative-mass quanta. Whenever static energy from
curved space is converted to virtual particle-antiparticle pair, it
isn't a quanta of positive mass leaving the black hole, it's a
quanta of *negative* mass *entering* the black hole, in essence an
anti-graviton. The mass of a black hole decreases not by positive
mass leaving, but by negative mass entering. So actually two
virtual particles enter the black hole, one of the two created
opposite particles, and the quanta of negative mass.

So why would a negative-mass quanta fall into a black hole, since
it's *repelled* from positive mass? Because frame dragging is a
*geometrical* process, an actual dragging of the frame in which
everything happens, not a force-at-distance effect. The
negative-mass quanta isn't attracted to the hole, it's simply
dragged into it.

So why doesn't the negative-mass quanta sometimes escape? For the
same reason the bottom of the two opposing particles doesn't escape.
If both virtual particles escape, they anihilate each other and
*all* the result falls right back in. It's only when one falls in
and one escapes that conservation of non-virtual mass-energy can be
conserved. Just as magnetic monopoles should in theory exist, but
we never see them, only their dipole effects, mass/antimass quanta
should in theory exist, but we see only their dipole effects,
namely that the negative mass is dragged into the black hole while
the positive mass helps the escaping particle get past the event
horizon. So why doesn't the negative mass escape while positive
mass fall in, after all the gravitational attractive force ought to
make a slight misbalance in that direction. Because the logic
of virtual particle creation must satisfy the Heisenberg uncertainty
principle, where you can cheat conservation laws only below the
Planck-constant limit, and whereas the singularity below the event
horizon provides a smaller-than-Plank sink for the negative mass if
it goes downward, there's no sink available if it goes upward, so
it *can't'* go upward. By comparison there's *always* a sink for
positive mass, namely empty space anywhere you look. So positive
mass can go either direction without problem.

Accounting totals: Gradient of gravity well induces the creation of
a particle-antiparticle pair, which contains positlve mass, and the
creation of some negative mass which simply drops back into the
black hole. Particle that falls in, plus negative-mass quanta that
falls in with it, is net negative mass, causing black hole to
become less massive. Particle that escapes contains the positive
mass equal and opposite do that negative mass, so the rest of the
Universe becomes more massive. (Or more simply, maybe Hawking was
slightly mistaken about what gets created. Maybe the only thing
created is a positive-massenergy photon instead of actual
particle-antiparticle pair, plus the negative-mass quanta of
course. The virtual photon escapes and becomes real, while the
virtual antiphoton is dragged across the event horizon within the
Planck window of opportunity and can never be directly observed.)

Time asymmetry caused by frame dragging happens with *every*
gravitational well, even the well around a single electron or
photon, it's just that it's too small to directly observe except
near a very massive object. Thus no particle interaction is exactly
time-reversible. Thus there may be a type of particle interaction
that creates particles or destroys antiparticles that runs faster
in that direction than in the reverse. This might have been the
trick that started the Big Bang, whereby a virtual Big Bang
spontaneously converted some mass-energy into an excess of
particles over antiparticles which could no longer exactly
anihilite, and then a brief symbiotic cascade of excess particle
creation produced most of the current particle excess. (Subsequent
assymetric particle production from Hawking radiation slightly
increased particle imbalance over time, but this effect has so-far
been negligable compared to the primordial cascade. In either case,
this is essentially "proton undecay".)

How ridiculously farfetched are my speculations about virtual
negative-mass particles/quanta? Is there anybody who can translate
my speculations into something that Hawking might be interested in
reading and considering, and is there anybody in this forum who has
contact with Hawking and could then relay the cleaned-up
speculations to him?

P.S. For the origin of the Big Bang, I'm currently still leaning
toward past-immortal extreme inflation with occasional bubbles of
reduced inflation that produce short-lived Guth-inflation bubbles
that evolve into the kinds of Universes of which we observe one,
where Dark Energy is the largest remaining form of inflation.
(My hope is that eventually Dark Energy will undergo a state change
just as Guth inflation did, thereby ending that one last known form
of inflation, so our Universe isn't totally torn apart.)

On Oct 16, 2:03 am, Pentcho Valev wrote:
Some day Einstein zombie world may even discover that Smolin's,
Hawking's etc. idiocies are simply camouflaging a truth that can be
extracted from the following two confessions:

Albert Einstein: "If the speed of light is the least bit affected by
the speed of the light source, then my whole theory of relativity and
theory of gravity is false."

Albert Einstein: "I consider it entirely possible that physics cannot
be based upon the field concept, that is on continuous structures.
Then nothing will remain of my whole castle in the air, including the
theory of gravitation, but also nothing of the rest of contemporary
physics."


Still struggling with trying to understand a statement
of the Scientific Method, I see.

- Randy

On Oct 15, 11:03 pm, Pentcho Valev wrote:


Albert Einstein: "I consider it entirely possible that physics cannot
be based upon the field concept, that is on continuous structures.
Then nothing will remain of my whole castle in the air, including the
theory of gravitation, but also nothing of the rest of contemporary
physics."


A computer simulation loosely based on quantum electrodynamics should
have the capacity to create artificial intelligence through neural
networks.

In the future when such a simulation is achieved, we will discover
that relativistic phenomena will arise naturally from the A.I.


http://www.cloudmusiccompany.com/absreality.jpg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pjPn5uhA0Q

On Oct 27, 12:02 pm, Randy Poe wrote:
On Oct 16, 2:03 am, Pentcho Valev wrote:


Albert Einstein: "If the speed of light is the least bit affected by
the speed of the light source, then my whole theory of relativity and
theory of gravity is false."

Albert Einstein: "I consider it entirely possible that physics cannot
be based upon the field concept, that is on continuous structures.
Then nothing will remain of my whole castle in the air, including the
theory of gravitation, but also nothing of the rest of contemporary
physics."

Still struggling with trying to understand a statement
of the Scientific Method, I see.


I'm sure Einstein would have a hard time accepting your version of the
scientific method.

He said that science is just a refinement of everyday thinking.

He was highly influential on Karl Popper, who essentially said there
is no such thing as the scientific method, but instead scientific
knowledge arises through the same process all knowledge arises:
conjecture and refutation intertwined heavily with Darwinistic themes.

Dear Robert Maas:

"Robert Maas, see http://tinyurl.com/uh3t"
wrote in message ...
From: "N:dlzc D:aol T:com \(dlzc\)"
This stuff is freely available, it is amazing that some
seem to diet entirely on crank websites.

I'm not one of those people. I read various books /
articles by Asimov and other respectable science
writers, and articles in Science.

Which makes them popularizations, and inaccurate in detail, if
not in general.

And based on what I read, I try to make sense out
of it all. The main problem for me has been time
reversibility for geodesics and other paths. But (see
late) I think I may have finally resolved this problem.

The time that an infaller sees for crossing the event
horizon is finite.

Agreed.

However it is on the order of the time the distant
observer would see the infaller reach the photon
sphere.

What do you mean by "see"??

I mean that in the standard sense. About the time someone well
outside 8M (with the event horizon at 2M) sees photons arriving
as the infaller crosses 3M (the photon sphere), is the time he /
she is actually crossing the event horizon.

The fact that the light from actual crossing "never"
exits is unsurprising, and not an indication that
mass "never enters" or is somehow frozen at the
horizon.

I never claimed anything is frozen at the event
horizon, merely that spacetime is stretched in a
non-Euclidean manner such that it's a very long
distance down into a black hole, almost like a
(fictional) "tardis" from Dr. Who TV show, where
the inside dimension is larger than the outside
dimension.

No. If anything, the radial dimension is foreshortened, and
certainly warped, since at the event horizon, no distance in any
direction is "out".

In two dimensions it's very easy to imagine, in
fact the Simpson's halloween episode where
Homer finds a secret passage behind a bookcase
and falls into a gridlike representation of a black
hole is somewhat realistic (except for Homer's
image itself *not* being tidally stretched into a
thin ribbon).

It is not required, if the black hole is many millions of solar
masses. It woud not be unusual to find a local value of g near
the event horizon to be "one Earth-surface normal gravity".

If you measure the total distance down one side
of the stretched time-space well and back out the
other side, that's orders of magnitude longer than
the distance around the gravity well avoiding the
deep part.

But not due to the path inward.

You can even do that with an ant crawling across a
physical water-well, shorter distance to go around
than to go down and across and back up.

With spacetime stretched very far just for a neutron
star not quite massive enough to form a black hole,
where the Simpson/ant metaphor applies nicely,
maybe as the mass approches enough to form a
black hole the stretching of spacetime is unbounded,
the physical depth of the hole extends faster than
any object can fall towards the event horizon, so the
very last particle to fall in, the one which *forms* the
black hole, falls forever never reaching the receding
event horizon.

Probably not.

http://hermes.physics.adelaide.edu.a...k_gravity.html
virtual particles aren't confined to the interiors of light
cones:
they can go faster than light!

That sounds crank to me!

Sorry, no. Virtual particles travel all possible paths and all
possible speeds (not limited by c). Consider what entanglement
means. That is the fundamental difference between quantum
mechanics, and a classical theory like GR.

http://hermes.physics.adelaide.edu.a...s/hawking.html
... you'll find Hawking radiation explained
this way in a lot of "pop-science" treatments:
Virtual particle pairs are constantly being created near
the horizon of the black hole, as they are everywhere.
Normally, they are created as a particle-antiparticle
pair and they quickly annihilate each other. But near
the horizon of a black hole, it's possible for one to fall
in before the annihilation can happen, in which case
the other one escapes as Hawking radiation.

Yes, that's my understanding.

In fact this argument also does not correspond in any
clear way to the actual computation. Or at least I've
never seen how the standard computation can be
transmuted into one involving virtual particles sneaking
over the horizon,

That's a strawman rebuttal. Nothing in the "pop science"
account says anything "sneaks" over the event horizon.
The virtual particles are created *outside* (but very near)
the event horizon.

How does the pair get from inside to outside the event horizon,
if they do not "sneak over the horizon"? What does quantum
tunnelling mean?

One particle falls inside, the other doesn't. The one that
doesn't fall inside was created outside in the first place
so it doesn't need to "sneak" outside. See my ideas
later below for more about this.

Now when we are in good old flat Minkowski spacetime,
a la special relativity, there are a bunch of "inertial
frames" differing by Lorentz transformations. These give
different time co-ordinates, but one can check that the
difference is never so bad that different co-ordinates give
different notions of positive or negative frequency
solutions of Maxwell's equations. Nor will different
people using these co-ordinate systems ever disagree
about what's the lowest-energy state. So all inertial
observers agree about what's a particle, what's an
antiparticle, and what's the vacuum.

That sounds right so I'll trust it.

But in curved spacetime there aren't these "best"
co-ordinate systems, the inertial ones. So even very
reasonable different choices of co-ordinates can give
disagreements about particles vs antiparticles, or
what's the vacuum.

OK.

Now in fact when you do a Bogoliubov transformation
to the vacuum you get a state in which there are pairs
of particles and antiparticles, so this is possibly the
link between the math and the heuristic explanation.

OK, so I'll stick with the heuristic explanation as
probably correct enough.

http://hermes.physics.adelaide.edu.a...info_loss.html
In order to understand why the information loss problem
is a problem, we need first to understand what it is.
Take a quantum system in a pure state and throw it into
a black hole. Wait for some amount of time until the
hole has evaporated enough to return to its mass
previous to throwing anything in. What we start with is a
pure state and a black hole of mass M. What we end up
with is a thermal state and a black hole of mass M.

I don't see a problem here. In general, entropy increases.
Black holes simply do this on an immense scale. What
am I missing?

I don't see the problem either. However a number of people
smarter than me, see issue with things like charge, mass, spin,
quantum numbers, etc. propagating out of a black hole, when
classical theory holds that nothing can propagate faster than c.
And escape velocity is only as low as c at the event horizon or
outside of it.

In technical jargon, the black hole has performed a
non-unitary transformation on the state of system.
As you may recall, non-unitary evolution is not
allowed to occur naturally in a quantum theory
because it fails to preserve probability, ie, after
non-unitary evolution, the sum of the probabilities
of all possible outcomes of an experiment may be
greater or less than 1.

I dispute that! I'd say that black holes in effect provide
a special type of non-unitary transformation which is
restricted to total of probabilities staying exactly at 1.
This is analagous to saying that local rotation always
preserves latitude and longitude and elevation, but
linear motion may change it. But a restricted type of
linear motation may nevertheless happen to preserve
both latitude and altitude, changing only longitude,
and another restricted type of linear motion may
happen to preserve longitude while changing both
altitude and latitude, etc. Linear motation *allows*
change in all three of latitude and longitude and
elevation, but doesn't *require* it, might change only
one or two of the three. If you only care about one of
the three, we say that it may or may not be changed.
Likewise non-unitary transformation *allows* violation
of total probabilities but doesn't require it. In the
case of entry to black hole followed by Hawking
radiation of equivalent total mass, that "allowed"
violation per the mathematical definition of non-unitary
transformation doesn't actually occur.

Actually this whole topic sounds fishy to me, since
ordinary absorbtion of photons to increase internal
temperature followed by ordinary blackbody radiation
does in fact thermalize the surrounding space by
converting information to entropy.

No conversion in your example. And I don't see that your
argument touches the point raised.

Two notes to finish off. First, you might think that
the thermal nature of the black hole is inevitable since
it is radiating, but you would be wrong. In most of
these quantum radiation calculations, the spectrum of
the radiation does not have a Planck spectrum. If that
had been the case for black holes, too, then we would
not be able to assign a temperature or an entropy to
black holes. In that case, people probably still would
not believe Bekenstein and instead of the information
loss paradox we'd still be wondering how to reconcile
black holes with the second law. The thermal
spectrum of Hawking radiation is one of the most
serendipitous results in modern physics, in my
opinion, which is another way of saying that
something deep and not understood is going on.

I assume what's called "Planck spectrum" above is the
same as what's usually called "blackbody spectrum" or
"the spectrum of blackbody radiation" or as below:
Linkname: Planck's law - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_body_radiation
Planck's law describes the spectral radiance of
electromagnetic radiation at all wavelengths from a
black body ...
Correct me if those aren't all the same spectrum expressed
in different words.

I think it is, yes.

Anyway, the equivalance between blackbody spectrum
and Hawking spectrum doesn't seem at all surprising to
me if both are related to the Casimir spectrum of the vacuum:
Linkname: Conjectured derivation of the Planck radiation
spectrum from Casimir energies
URL: http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/0305-4470/36/26/313/
(This turned up earlier in my Google search for "Planck
spectrum", before I found the WikiPedia article.)

Perhaps not surprising to you, but why should it be the same?

http://hermes.physics.adelaide.edu.a.../universe.html
My reading of this article is that the properties of the event
horizon of a black hole comes not just from the static mass
within it but also from the momentum of stuff falling into it,
and if enough mass were *leaving* it (on some a priori
basis) it might not be a black hole at all but a white hole
instead, like the Big Bang. Perhaps this is the resolution
to the paradox of the last moment of a black hole
evaporating via Hawking radiation, that the momentum
of Hawking radiation exceeds the internal mass, so for a
brief final moment it becomes a white hole?

Well, even a black hole with the mass of the Earth is barely
above the CMBR temperature. Not a very interesting "white hole".

The major assumption of the FRW cosmologies is that
the universe is homogeneous and isotropic on large
scales. That is to say that it looks the same everywhere
and in every direction at any given cosmological time.
There is good astronomical evidence that the distribution
of galaxies is fairly homogeneous and isotropic on scales
larger than a few hundred million light years. The high
level of isotropy of the cosmic background radiation (CBR)
is strong supporting evidence for homogeneity.

This whole article sounds like it was written before Guth
conceived of the idea of inflation. Now the explanation of
our current almost exactly homogeneous and isotropic
universe is that shortly-pre-inflation there was enough
cross-communication to smooth it out, and then inflation
expanded one local very-flat region, fudged only by
quantum fluctuations, to be of macroscopic size, which
eventually expanded to megalightyear size. The
very-pre-inflation Universe needn't have been either
isotropic or homogenous.

Not really. The link talks about the assumed uniformity of the
FRW metric, and how it corresponds experimentally to *this*
Universe, and Guth is talking about how that might have come
about.

It follows that the time reversal of this model for a
collapsing sphere of dust is indistinguishable from
the FRW models if the dust sphere is larger than
the observable universe. In other words, we cannot
rule out the possibility that the universe is a very
large white hole. Only by waiting many billions of
years until the edge of the sphere comes into view
could we know.

No question this *was* written before Dark Energy
was discovered!! Not only will we never get a chance
to see stuff that is already past or local event horizon,
but even stuff we can see now will eventually
dark-energy-inflate beyond our future local event
horizon so we will never again get to see it.
We ain't never gonna see that edge of that sphere!!!

The edge follows us, so I would tend to agree with you.

Not that I expect actual facts to sway your opinion at all.

Um, calculations from G.R. by Schwarzschild do not
constitute *facts*. The best conclusive *fact* I've read
about regarding black holes is that hot gas radiating
X-rays in orbit near the "lowest stable orbit" gradually
decays until it actually reaches that "lowest stable orbit",
then within a fraction of a second it completely
disappears somehow, per the calculation of what would
happen if its orbit were no longer stable, due to
downward frame dragging toward the event horizon of a
black hole. (Actually due to redshifting and delay of light
coming out the gravity well, what happens is that its
radiance is decreased and redshifted so that the "last
photon" gets out to "lowest stable orbit" distance within
a fraction of a second after the emitting object drops
below that orbit, and then our time-delayed view
thousands of lightyears away sees those two events a
fraction of a second apart. Theoretically it *could* emit
a few more photons, redshifted to very very low energy,
which get out millions to billions of years later, but we
won't notice any of them.)

Your strawman of assumption that I was referring to Schwarzchild
*anything* as fact is noted.

Now as to why the Subject field change, and in fact
why I bothered to respond at all: This morning I awoke
early with a new idea about black holes. The first part
below was merely outlined in my half-awake state,
and being fleshed out now, while the rest below was
almost fully written a few minutes later. All of that early
morning stuff was before I read the articles you cited
above.

One basic principle of physics is that geodesics are
reversible, light travels the same speed in all directions,
in fact all paths of objects are reversible, if we take
time-mirror image of any action we get another thing
that could really happen.

According to that principle, any geodesic or other path
that goes toward a black hole could be time-reversed
to yield a path coming out of a black hole.

Except that an "ingoing" geodesic approaches a singularity from
the finite side...

The only way to explain that things go in but never
come out is that it takes forever to go in, because the
gravity well is infinitely deep, so things never finish
falling in, and before anything can come out it must
have traveled for an infinitely long time, which is
impossible because the black hole itself has been
around at most 13.7 billion years (actually much
smaller in most cases).

Time for you to turn away from the Schwrzchild metric you seem to
revile then. Look into Kruskal or Eddington metrics, where
interior spacetime geometry is only necessarily loosely related
to exterior spacetime geometry.

But I realized this morning that that principle isn't
correct!!! Light falls into a well faster than it comes
out.

No. Light does not fall at all. Light always travels at c
locally, with curved geometry puting limits on what one can
consider "local".

This is because frame dragging happens not only
rotationally around a rotating mass, but also
downward due to the static mass.

Dude, you have got to stop learning physics from The Simpsons.
In other words, "not even wrong".

What about Michaelson-Morley type of experiments?
They weren't accurate enough to detect either type of
frame dragging.

They weren't designed to detect frame dragging, on a fully
closed path, light is going to "drag" to the same spot.

New orbiting satellites *have* verified frame dragging
caused by rotation.

LAGEOS.

But what about the special relativity conclusion that
light travels the same speed in all directions? That
applies only to inertial frames.

And where mass is inconsequential, which obviates frame dragging
experiments. But SR can be extended accurately to some
accelerating frames, just for what it is worth.

If you're sitting flat on Earth, not freefalling, held up
by the Earth's surface, you're *not* in an inertial
frame, light is being dragged downward by the
frames. But the effect is so small we can't presently
measure it.

Not even wrong.

Update: One of those articles you cited had a "Red
Queen race" metaphor. It failed to mention frame
dragging, but otherwise it looks correct. At the event
horizon, the frame is being dragged downward so
rapidly that the theoretical event horizon has to climb
at the speed of light just to stay in-place per outside
measurements. So because of frame dragging,
there's no such thing as a static black hole in the
sense of time-reversible geodesics. Frames are
being dragged into the black hole all the time, and the
constant speed of light and SOL limit on all other
speeds is relative to these dragged frames, not relative
to any sort of classical fixed frame around the black hole.

You are using these terms in non-standard ways. You are going to
have difficulty both in getting people to listen to you, and in
conveying your actual meaning. Frames are NOT dragged downwards
by gravity.

I don't see this getting any better as you are wiping the sleep
from your eyes, so I'll leave it here.

David A. Smith