[Paleopsych] big bagels and black holes
HowlBloom at aol.com
HowlBloom at aol.com
Fri Jan 21 21:58:19 UTC 2005
More on black holes. There are a number of theories in the world of
theoretical physics (not just the world of Buddhism) in which the universe is
cyclical—it dies and from its cinder is born again. One of those is my Big Bagel
Theory. Others include Max Tegmark’s toroidal theory, a theory in which the
cosmos is also curved like a doughnut, and a theory in which “branes”—
skin-like surfaces on which universes spread—periodically meet. In most of these
theories the universe ends in a big crunch that’s the mirror opposite of the
big bang, then a new universe pops out of the singularity of that crunch.
A question I’ve been pondering, and occasionally muttering about on
paleopsych over the last year or so, goes something like this. Can we or whatever
beasts are burped out after us by the creative cosmos manage to sum up what we’
ve learned and pass it through the eye of the needle, through the singularity
of the big crunch, and on to whatever cosmos comes after us? In other
words, can universes learn from their parents?
The answer would have been “no” a year or two ago. Information, said the
party line, can’t pass through a singlurity—it can’t stream through the
infinitessimal squinch in time and space that makes for big bangs, big crunches,
and black holes. Well, now the view of just how much a singularity turns all
information into non-information seems to be changing. First Stephen Hawking
changed his mind in the summer of 2004 and decided that information can,
indeed, sift into—and, more important, out of—the singularity of a black hole.
Now a bunch of other theoretical physicists are discovering ways their
theoretical structures also make the sluicing of data through the eye of the
needle, through a singularity, possible.
Which brings us back to the question—can one cosmos pass its wisdom on to
the cosmos that comes after it? Can universes learn, then pass their knowledge
on from one generation to the next and through the next to universes ten
generations down the line? Can information scrunchers like us humans possibly
become part of this process? Can we—or can our great, greate, great,
grandchildren a million generations down the line—find ways to compress knowledge so
it passes through the big crunch on to the next big bang?
The answer has shifted from what it was two years ago. Then it was an
unequivocal “no”. Now it’s just conceivably “yes”. Howard
Ps. For those who don’t know the Bloom Big Bagel Theory, conceived in 1959,
then supported in surprising ways when we discovered in 1998 that the
universe is accelarating in its expansion, I’ll toss in an old summary below. And
below that is an article summing up the new views on information’s passage
through and/or out of black holes and, by implication, other singularities.
The Big Bagel Theory. We can do this the easy way, or we can do it the
hard way. The easy way is Rob Kritkausky’s animation of the theory, which isn’
t quite complete but gets a heck of a lot across in a very small amount of
time. The animation is at _http://www.bigbangtango.org/website/BigBagel.htm_
(http://www.bigbangtango.org/website/BigBagel.htm)
The hard way is by using words. Here come the words:
The Bloom Big Bagel theory of the cosmos says that at the infinitessimally
small point of the beginning of the Big Bang, two cosmoses whomped out, each
into its own curved plane of space. One is the cosmos in which we live. The
other is the cosmos of anti-matter. Do we need a silly, comic-book level
theory of this sort? We sure as heck do. When I went through several hundred
astrophysics papers trying to find the dates of nucleogenesis of the various
complex atoms--the atoms beyond hydrogen, helium, and lithium--I couldn't
find the information. Why? Because there is a subject in astrophysics called
nucleocosmochronology. You'd think that chronologists of the birth of nucleii
would try to figure out the date of the first iron atom, the first, oxygen
atom, the first potassium atom, and so on. But, no. There's something else
on nucleocosmochronologist's minds. It's a simple question. Why is there so
much ordinary matter in this universe and so little anti-matter? Theory says
that the amount of ordinary matter and anti-matter should be the same. So
where did all the anti-matter go? The Bloom Big Bagel Theory of the Cosmos is
toroidal. In topology, that means it’s doughnut-like. Big Bagel Theory
says to idiots like me, "Hey, nut case, the missing anti-matter went into a
negative universe, a universe in which time runs in reverse, a universe in which
its obstreperous backwardness actually fits." Meanwhile, astrophysicists are
now asking why the universe's elements--novas, stars, and galaxies--accel
erate away from each other once they pass a certain point. They've tried a
bunch of names to account for whatever the cause might be--negative gravity,
quintessence, the cosmological constant, and, this year's favorite, dark energy.
But Big Bagel theory says that a curved space represents a curve in
gravity. Gravity tells space how to bend. Reach the highpoint of the bagel and you
begin to slide down a gravity curve. You begin to accelerate. You do it
for two reasons simultaneously (two reasons that are simultaneous and seem
each others opposites may be instances of Niels Bohr's complimentarity). Once
you get over the hump, gravity turns negative--it pushes you away from a
common gravitational center instead of toward that center. And once you get over
the hump, you're being pulled by the gravity of the anti-universe. When the
two universes meet at the outer limits of the Big Bagel they annihilate to a
pinprick of energy and are back where they started, in the center,
big-banging and big-bageling again. The idea of an anti-universe gains a peculiar kind
of support--and a new kind of reality--from the concept that i=the square
root of minus one. There is no square root of minus one, so why does it show
up in calculations that actually predict things we can measure? Because the
square root of minus one doesnt' exist HERE. It exists THERE...in the
anti-universe on the underside of the bagel. Those two universes were once one.
They will be one again someday...when they meet on the bagel's outer limit, its
periphery. So it makes sense that the math of this cosmos--our cosmos--has
to use the math of the negative cosmos, too. The matter universe and the
anti-matter universe are twins and will continue to be connected--even if only
distantly--so long as they both exist.
________
Now for the articles on the ways in which information could slip through a
singularity--
Retrieved January 20, 2005, from the World Wide Web
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18524836.500 Free E-Zines Subscribe to Magazine
Customer Service 21 January 2005 Black holes, but not as we know them 22 January
2005 From New Scientist Print Edition. Subscribe and get 4 free issues. JR
Minkel JR Minkel is a writer in New York City More Stories Explore:
fundamentals Explore: space Enlarge image Black hole revolution Enlarge image
Black holesTHEY are the most fearsome objects in the universe. They swallow and
destroy everything that crosses their path. Everyone knows that falling into
a black hole spells doom. Or does it? In the past few years, cracks have
started to appear in the conventional picture. Researchers on the quest for a
more complete understanding of our universe are finding that black holes are not
so black, and perhaps not holes either. Furious debates are raging over what
black holes contain and even whether they deserve the name. The term "black
hole" was coined in the 1960s by physicist John Wheeler to describe what
happens when matter is piled into an infinitely dense point in space-time. When a
star runs out of nuclear fuel, for example, the waste that remains collapses
in on itself, fast and hard. The gravitational attraction of this matter can
overwhelm its natural tendency to repel itself. If the star is big enough,
the result will be a singularity. Around the singularity lies an event
horizon, a point of no return. Light cannot escape once it passes beyond this
boundary, and the eventual fate of everything within it is to be crushed into the
singularity. But this picture always contained the seeds of its own
destruction. In 1975 Stephen Hawking at the University of Cambridge calculated that
black holes would slowly but inexorably evaporate. According to the laws of
quantum mechanics, pairs of "virtual" particles and antiparticles continually
bubble up in empty space. Hawking showed that the gravitational energy of the
black hole could be lent to virtual particles near the event horizon. These
could then become real, and escape, carrying away positive energy in the form
of "Hawking radiation". Over time, the black hole will bleed away into outer
space. This led to a problem dubbed the information paradox. While relativity
seems to suggest that information about matter falling into a black hole
would be lost, quantum mechanics seemed to be suggesting it would eventually
escape. Hawking claimed the random nature of Hawking radiation meant that while
energy could escape, information could not. But last summer, he changed his
mind (New Scientist, 17 July 2004, p 11). His reversal was just one part of a
larger movement to rethink the rules that govern black holes. Much of the
impetus for this rethink comes from string theory, our best attempt to unify
general relativity and quantum mechanics. Now 20 years old, string theory posits
that space-time, and everything in it, is composed of vibrating strings so
small we will be lucky ever to get evidence of their existence. Its big appeal
is the promise that it could unite general relativity and quantum mechanics,
because one type of string carries the force of gravity, while the vibration
of the strings is random, as predicted by quantum mechanics. String theory
was first applied to black holes in the mid-1990s. Andrew Strominger and
Cumrun Vafa of Harvard University began to work on the information paradox by
imagining what the inside of a black hole might be like. The researchers found
that string theory would allow them to build highly dense little structures
from strings and other objects in string theory, some of which had more than
three dimensions. These structures worked just like black holes: their
gravitational pull prevents light escaping from them. “The number of ways strings can
be arranged in black holes is amazingly large”Strominger and Vafa counted
how many ways the strings in these black holes could be arranged, and found
this was amazingly large. The calculation was heralded as a huge validation
for string theory. In the 1970s, Hawking and Jacob Bekenstein, then at
Princeton University, had calculated the entropy of a black hole using quantum
mechanics. The entropy of an object is roughly a measure of the amount of
information it can contain. In particular, it measures the number of different ways
the parts making up an object can be arranged. It just so happened that the
number of ways that Strominger and Vafa calculated that strings could be
arranged in a black hole exactly matched the entropy calculated by Hawking and
Bekenstein. Fuzzballs But this did not tell physicists how those strings were
arranged. Over the past year, Samir Mathur of Ohio State University and his
colleagues have begun to look at what string configurations there could be in
black holes. They found that the strings would always connect together to form a
large, very floppy string, which would be much larger than a point-size
singularity. Mathur's group calculated the total physical sizes of several
stringy black holes, which they prefer to call "fuzzballs" or "stringy stars". To
his surprise, they found they were the same size as the event horizon is in
traditional theory. "It is changing our picture of the black hole interior,"
says Mathur. "It would really mean the picture of the round hole with a black
dot in the centre is wrong." Mathur's fuzzball does away with the idea of
the event horizon as a sharp boundary. In the traditional view, the event
horizon is a well-defined limit. Objects passing particular points in space at
particular moments in time are guaranteed to end up being pulverised at the
black hole singularity. In the fuzzball picture, the event horizon is a frothing
mass of strings, not a sharp boundary. The fuzzball picture also challenges
the idea that a black hole destroys information. In Mathur's description,
there is no singularity. The mass of strings reaches all the way to the fuzzy
event horizon. This means information can be stored in the strings and
imprinted on outgoing Hawking radiation. So what happens to the information that
falls into a black hole? Imagine pouring cream into black coffee. Drop the
coffee and cream into the old-style black hole and they will go to the
singularity and be lost. You will never see the results of the mixture. But drop your
coffee and cream onto a Mathur fuzzball and information about the cream-coffee
mixture will be encoded into string vibrations. Hawking radiation that comes
out can carry detailed information about what happened to each particle of
cream and every particle of coffee. "There's no information problem. It's like
any other ball of cotton," says Mathur. This picture is very preliminary,
cautions Vafa. Mathur has not yet calculated exactly how his model applies to
large black holes or understood how a black hole evolves over time. Gary
Horowitz of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Juan Maldacena of
the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, also recently
proposed that information can get out of a black hole. But unlike Mathur, they
believe that black holes do contain a singularity at their heart. They suggested
that information might escape by means of quantum teleportation. This allows
the state of one particle to be instantly teleported to another. So Horowitz
and Maldacena suggested that information could pass from matter hitting the
singularity to outgoing Hawking radiation. “The most information any black
hole would possibly retain is just half a bit - everything else will
eventually escape”But to make their calculation work, they had to assume that
infalling matter and outgoing radiation would not collide with each other. If they
did, this could disrupt the teleportation process. Quantum information
theorists Daniel Gottesman of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in
Waterloo, Canada, and John Preskill of the California Institute of Technology in
Pasadena say such disruption could occur very easily. That seems to raise a
problem for Horowitz and Maldacena. But last summer, Seth Lloyd of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology worked out that all such disruptions would
actually cancel each other out. Then Lloyd calculated that the most information
a black hole would possibly retain permanently was just half a bit -
everything else will eventually escape. This applies to all black holes, whether
they are supermassive ones at the heart of a galaxy (see "Giants of the
universe") or mini black holes created in a particle accelerator (see "Baby black
holes"). But Gottesman and Preskill have a second criticism that might be more
fatal to the teleportation picture. They showed that the effect could allow
faster-than-light communication, which is taboo in relativity. The
teleportation calculation relies on the assumption that every piece of matter inside a
black hole has the same quantum state. Although quantum mechanics allows one
particle to have an instantaneous effect on the quantum state of another,
this cannot be used to communicate. For example, if one person, Alice, measures
the quantum state of a particle that is linked with a particle held by her
friend, Bob, the effect of this measurement will be instantaneously
communicated to Bob's, but there is no way to use this to communicate faster than light,
because Alice needs to tell Bob what kind of measurement process she carried
out on her particle, before he can decode the meaning of the change he sees.
That information has to travel to Bob in the normal way. Black hole
communication However, if Alice throws her particle into a black hole, the
researchers found the measurement will be immediately constrained to the quantum
state of the black hole. This would have an effect on Bob's particle that he
could determine without needing the extra information from Alice. Gottesman
concludes that the teleportation idea cannot work very well. Indeed, he wonders if
the framing of the information paradox is wrong in a way that is not yet
understood. "My own guess is somehow we're asking a stupid question," he says.
The scenario also bothers quantum-gravity theorist Ted Jacobson of the
University of Maryland, who still believes that the information that falls into
black holes is lost forever to those outside the black hole. He finds the
teleportation picture particularly unconvincing. "I put it in the category of
desperate attempts to make information come out," he says. And even the
researchers themselves aren't sure they are right. "We suggested one possibility,"
says Horowitz, but he admits it doesn't have a good basis in string theory yet.
"So I can't say we are confident this is the right picture." Jacobson argues
that the connection between the outside and inside of a black hole is so
complicated in string theory that no one can be sure they have ruled out the
possibility of information leaking out of our space-time. People may be simply
assuming the conclusion that they want for their own reasons. "I see no
problem with letting the darn stuff fall down the drain. Why are people so afraid
of the singularity?" The problem, says Vafa, is that the concept of
information could be very subtle in string theory, and not yet well-defined.
"Information loss is a critical question, but our understanding of black holes is too
primitive." So whether information can escape from black holes or is
destroyed remains a topic of intense debate. But there might turn out to be a third
option. One competing theory to string theory is called loop quantum gravity,
pioneered by, among others, Lee Smolin of the Perimeter Institute in
Waterloo, Canada. It proposes that space-time is constructed of loops even smaller
than strings. Joining loops together creates a mesh of nodes and branches
called a spin network. The advantage of this model is that space-time itself can
be built out of these networks instead of having to be assumed, as it is in
string theory. Abhay Ashtekar of Pennsylvania State University in Pittsburgh
and Martin Bojowald of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in
Golm, Germany, have studied a model of a black hole created using spin
networks. They found the equations that describe space-time continue to apply in
an orderly way even at the singularity itself. This is very different to the
conventional picture, in which the equations of physics break down when
space-time collapses. It means that information that reaches the singularity could
survive there, encoded in the spin networks. As far as Ashtekar and Bojowald
can tell, the information trapped in a black hole will be unable to escape
via Hawking radiation. Wait long enough, however, and it will survive,
eventually rejoining the rest of the universe when the black hole evaporates. So
whatever the theory that eventually supersedes relativity, it seems a good
possibility that black holes may be just a little less dramatic than we thought.
After all, who's afraid of a big ball of string? From issue 2483 of New
Scientist magazine, 22 January 2005, page 28 Giants of the universe While debate
rages over what black holes really are, the astronomical evidence that every
galaxy is built around a supermassive black hole is stronger than ever.
Observations made with the Hubble Space Telescope have found that every galaxy has
a mass at its core millions of times as massive as our sun. The bigger this
mass, the larger the size of the "galactic bulge" - the number of stars
clustered around the galactic centre. The speed with which stars orbit the
centre of a galaxy reveals the mass of the object they are orbiting, and very
careful measurements can reveal its size too. For a handful of galaxies,
including the Milky Way, the central mass is known to be crammed into a space just a
few times as wide as the distance between the Earth and the sun, indicating
that what lies within is so dense, it must be a black hole. Some young
galaxies emit copious amounts of high-energy radio and X-ray radiation. Lines in
X-ray spectra taken from these objects are shifted as if the rays had struggled
to escape from the strong gravitational field of a supermassive black hole.
The closest object to the centre of our galaxy is a bright, compact source
of radiation known as Sagittarius A*. X-ray flares coming from it, and picked
up by the Chandra X-ray telescope, are thought to be the dying gasps of
matter falling into a supermassive black hole. Baby black holes You don't have to
go to space to find a black hole: mini versions could be created to order,
right here on Earth. That's what some physicists claim will be possible using
the world's most powerful particle accelerator, due to turn on in 2007.
Currently under construction at the CERN laboratory in Geneva, the Large Hadron
Collider will smash protons together with a collision energy of 14,000 billion
electronvolts. This might just be enough to create several black holes every
second, provided some strange ideas about unknown physics turn out to be
right. Each mini wonder would weigh no more than a few micrograms and be smaller
than a speck of dust. A black hole is thought to form when the core of a
massive star collapses under its own weight and is crushed to a point. Vast
amounts of matter weighing more than a few suns are needed to produce gravity
strong enough for this to happen. Yet the special theory of relativity gives a
clue to making black holes in the laboratory. Einstein used the theory to show
that energy is equivalent to matter. So black holes should also pop into
existence when vast amounts of energy are concentrated into a point, and that's
exactly what happens when particles smash together at extreme energies. But
there's a snag. According to our existing knowledge of particles and the
forces that operate between them, the minimum energy needed to make a black hole
this way is 10 million billion times more than LHC can produce. And the
chances of ever building a particle accelerator that can reach such energies are
virtually nil. In the past few years though, the prospects for making black
holes in the lab have improved. This is down to a theory that says gravity is
actually much stronger than we think. Huge masses are needed for the force
of gravity to become important in everyday life, and this feebleness puzzles
physicists. Some suggest that it can be explained if space has extra,
invisible dimensions that only gravity can reach. The gravitational force leaks away
into them, while our universe and the particles spewing out of accelerators
are trapped in three dimensions, rather like specks of dust on the surface of
a soap bubble. If the idea is right, gravity could be much stronger when it
applies over distances so small that there is no chance of leakage into other
dimensions. Pack enough energy into a 10-20-metre space and it could be
enough to create a black hole. These mini curiosities will evaporate within
10-26 seconds, losing most of their mass by radiating energy, as predicted by
Stephen Hawking. A group led by Roberto Emparan at the University of the Basque
Country in Bilbao, Spain, calculated that most of this Hawking radiation
should appear as particles that can be spotted by detectors. If Emparan is right,
the LHC could provide the first evidence for Hawking radiation from a black
hole. A computer simulation devised by Bryan Webber at the University of
Cambridge and others creates mini black holes from LHC-style collisions. The
simulation shows that the structures should decay into a large number of
high-energy particles, which would be sprayed all over the detector. If the theory
is right, researchers expect to see many more of these striking events than
they might otherwise. By measuring the energy and momentum of the particles
radiated, they hope to measure the mass of the mini marvels. Valerie Jamieson
New Scientist magazine © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd. Home
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Jobs
----------
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; Core
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
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