[Paleopsych] Re: Hawking surprises GR 17

Fri Jul 16 05:42:38 UTC 2004

Dear Howard,

Is not every living being shedding irretrivable information into the universe? Cheers, Val Geist
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: HowlBloom at aol.com 
  To: isaacsonj at hotmail.com 
  Cc: paleopsych at paleopsych.org 
  Sent: Thursday, July 15, 2004 9:43 PM
  Subject: [Paleopsych] Re: Hawking surprises GR 17

  All thanks, Joel.  I seized on this one, too.

  The insight--that black holes DO allow information to escape, seemed intuitively obvious, perhaps because in big bang theory this entire cosmos leaked into existence from the equivalent of a black hole--a singularity.

  If I understand what Hawking's getting at, and there's a chance that I may not, his notion gives credence to one of my bizarre speculations--that whatever information this cosmos gathers in its lifetime, it will be able to pass on to the universe on the other side of the big crunch in which the cosmos will end.  

  In other words, universes, I suspect, can gather a store of networked information and, if they have clever beings with will and hubris, can compress that information and pass it on to their progeny.  J

  ust as we living beings pass information on through genes or through memes, the cosmos that produces willfull, living beings can take their primitive capacities a long way in 20 billion years or so.

  That 20 billion year figure, by the way, is based on my guess that this cosmos will survive for a total span of 30 billion years from birth to destruction.  Others better qualified than I am--Max Tegmark for example, who has a toroidal theory like mine-- put the total lifespan of the universe in the trillions of years.  Onward--Howard
  In a message dated 7/15/2004 2:07:56 PM Eastern Standard Time, isaacsonj at hotmail.com writes:

    The World's No.1 Science & Technology News Service

    Hawking cracks black hole paradox
    ==========================

    19:00 14 July 04

    Exclusive from New Scientist Print Edition. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.

    After nearly 30 years of arguing that a black hole destroys everything that 
    falls into it, Stephen Hawking is saying he was wrong. It seems that black 
    holes may after all allow information within them to escape. Hawking will 
    present his latest finding at a conference in Ireland next week.

    The about-turn might cost Hawking, a physicist at the University of 
    Cambridge, an encyclopaedia because of a bet he made in 1997. More 
    importantly, it might solve one of the long-standing puzzles in modern 
    physics, known as the black hole information paradox.

    It was Hawking's own work that created the paradox. In 1976, he calculated 
    that once a black hole forms, it starts losing mass by radiating energy. 
    This "Hawking radiation" contains no information about the matter inside the 
    black hole and once the black hole evaporates, all information is lost.

    But this conflicts with the laws of quantum physics, which say that such 
    information can never be completely wiped out. Hawking's argument was that 
    the intense gravitational fields of black holes somehow unravel the laws of 
    quantum physics.

    Other physicists have tried to chip away at this paradox. Earlier in 2004, 
    Samir Mathur of Ohio State University in Columbus and his colleagues showed 
    that if a black hole is modelled according to string theory - in which the 
    universe is made of tiny, vibrating strings rather than point-like particles 
    - then the black hole becomes a giant tangle of strings. And the Hawking 
    radiation emitted by this "fuzzball" does contain information about the 
    insides of a black hole (New Scientist print edition, 13 March).

    Big reputation

    Now, it seems that Hawking too has an answer to the conundrum and the 
    physics community is abuzz with the news. Hawking requested at the last 
    minute that he be allowed to present his findings at the 17th International 
    Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation in Dublin, Ireland.

    "He sent a note saying 'I have solved the black hole information paradox and 
    I want to talk about it'," says Curt Cutler, a physicist at the Albert 
    Einstein Institute in Golm, Germany, who is chairing the conference's 
    scientific committee. "I haven't seen a preprint [of the paper]. To be quite 
    honest, I went on Hawking's reputation."

    Though Hawking has not yet revealed the detailed maths behind his finding, 
    sketchy details have emerged from a seminar Hawking gave at Cambridge. 
    According to Cambridge colleague Gary Gibbons, an expert on the physics of 
    black holes who was at the seminar, Hawking's black holes, unlike classic 
    black holes, do not have a well-defined event horizon that hides everything 
    within them from the outside world.

    In essence, his new black holes now never quite become the kind that gobble 
    up everything. Instead, they keep emitting radiation for a long time, and 
    eventually open up to reveal the information within. "It's possible that 
    what he presented in the seminar is a solution," says Gibbons. "But I think 
    you have to say the jury is still out."

    Forever hidden

    At the conference, Hawking will have an hour on 21 July to make his case. If 
    he succeeds, then, ironically, he will lose a bet that he and theoretical 
    physicist Kip Thorne of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 
    Pasadena made with John Preskill, also of Caltech.

    They argued that "information swallowed by a black hole is forever hidden, 
    and can never be revealed".

    "Since Stephen has changed his view and now believes that black holes do not 
    destroy information, I expect him [and Kip] to concede the bet," Preskill 
    told New Scientist. The duo are expected to present Preskill with an 
    encyclopaedia of his choice "from which information can be recovered at 
    will".

    Jenny Hogan

  ----------
  Howard Bloom
  Author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st Century
  Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University; Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute
  www.howardbloom.net
  www.bigbangtango.net
  Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: Epic of Evolution Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; founder: The Big Bang Tango Media Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy of Political Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International Society for Human Ethology; advisory board member: Youthactivism.org; executive editor -- New Paradigm book series.
  For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see: www.paleopsych.org
  for two chapters from 
  The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer
  For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

  _______________________________________________
  paleopsych mailing list
  paleopsych at paleopsych.org
  http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych

  ---
  Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free.
  Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com).
  Version: 6.0.720 / Virus Database: 476 - Release Date: 7/14/2004
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/paleopsych/attachments/20040715/9a208f17/attachment.html>