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"Stephen Hawking" - "There are no blackholes"! and other startling assertions made
For those who are fascinated by the state of science and physics I want to share some news items that came out very recently.
1. Stephen Hawking says there are no blackholes
2. Recent experiments of measuring the radius of Proton very precisely show that the measured numbers are off by five fold. The implication is that physicists may be embarking on a whole new realm of Physics. The best understood theory in all of Physics arguably is called the QED - Quantum Electro-Dynamics (Feynman et al proposed in 1950s) The theory from first principles predicts experimental results to the accuracy with uncertainty of 0.00000000001 percent. This theory (even in my student days this was one of the toughest courses to master) now has to be reconciled with recent experiments.
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For those that want to read a bit more let me provide some more details that is still readable by non-science people
1. Visit this Link
For those who are fascinated by the state of science and physics I want to share some news items that came out very recently.
1. Stephen Hawking says there are no blackholes
2. Recent experiments of measuring the radius of Proton very precisely show that the measured numbers are off by five fold. The implication is that physicists may be embarking on a whole new realm of Physics. The best understood theory in all of Physics arguably is called the QED - Quantum Electro-Dynamics (Feynman et al proposed in 1950s) The theory from first principles predicts experimental results to the accuracy with uncertainty of 0.00000000001 percent. This theory (even in my student days this was one of the toughest courses to master) now has to be reconciled with recent experiments.
================================
For those that want to read a bit more let me provide some more details that is still readable by non-science people
1. Visit this Link
Stephen Hawking has produced a "mind-bending" new theory that argues black holes do not actually exist - at least not in the way we currently perceive them.
Instead, in his paper, Information Preservation and Weather Forecasting for Black Holes, Hawking proposes that black holes can exist without 'event horizons', the invisible cover believed to surround every black hole.
During a previous lecture, 'Into the Black Hole', Hawkins described an event horizon as the boundary of a black hole, "where gravity is just strong enough to drag light back, and prevent it escaping".
“Falling through the event horizon, is a bit like going over Niagara Falls in a canoe", he said. "If you are above the falls, you can get away if you paddle fast enough, but once you are over the edge, you are lost. There's no way back.
"As you get nearer the falls, the current gets faster. This means it pulls harder on the front of the canoe, than the back. There's a danger that the canoe will be pulled apart. It is the same with black holes.”
But now, Hawking is proposing 'apparent horizons' could exist instead, which would only hold light and information temporarily before releasing them back into space in 'garbled form', Nature has reported.
The internationally-renowned theoretical physicist suggests that quantum mechanics and general relativity remain intact, but black holes do not have an event horizon to catch fire.
Stephen Hawking, internationally-renowned theoretical physicist, proposes the absence of event horizonsHis work attempts to address the 'black-hole firewall paradox' first discovered by theoretical physicist Joseph Polchinski and his colleagues almost two years ago, when Polchinski and his team began investigating what would happen to an astronaut who fell into a black hole.
They hypothesised that instead of being gradually ripped apart by gravitational forces, the event horizon would be transformed into a 'highly energetic region', and anyone who fell in would hit a wall of fire and burn to death in an instant - violating Albert Einstein's theory of relativity.
In his paper, Hawking writes: "The absence of event horizons means that there are no black holes - in the sense of regimes from which light can't escape to infinity."
He told Nature journal: “There is no escape from a black hole in classical theory, but quantum theory, however, “enables energy and information to escape from a black hole.”
Don Page, a physicist and expert on black holes at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada told Nature that "the picture Hawking gives sounds pretty reasonable".
“You could say that it is radical to propose there’s no event horizon", he said. "But these are highly quantum conditions, and there’s ambiguity about what space-time even is, let alone whether there is a definite region that can be marked as an event horizon.”
[h=1]The Proton Radius Puzzle[/h]Two experiments have come up with two wildly different values for the proton's radius. What's going on?
https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?ur...-radius-puzzle/&text=The Proton Radius Puzzlehttp://www.facebook.com/sharer/shar...merican.com/article/the-proton-radius-puzzle/https://plus.google.com/share?url=h...merican.com/article/the-proton-radius-puzzle/http://www.reddit.com/submit
You would be forgiven for Assuming that we understand the proton. It is, after all, the main constituent of matter in the observable universe, the fuel of stellar furnaces. Studies of the proton—its positive charge suitably bound up with a negatively charged electron to make a hydrogen atom—initiated the quantum-mechanical revolution a century ago. Today researchers trigger torrents of ultrahigh-energy proton collisions to conjure particle exotica such as the Higgs boson.
Yet recent studies of the proton have surprised us. The two of us (Bernauer and Pohl), along with our colleagues, have made the most precise measurements of the radius of the proton to date, using two complementary experiments. When we began the exercise, we suspected that our results would help add levels of precision to the known size of the proton. We were wrong. Our measurements of the proton's radius differ by a huge gulf. The difference is more than five times the uncertainty in either measurement, implying that the probability that this is all due to chance is less than one in a million.
Instead, in his paper, Information Preservation and Weather Forecasting for Black Holes, Hawking proposes that black holes can exist without 'event horizons', the invisible cover believed to surround every black hole.
During a previous lecture, 'Into the Black Hole', Hawkins described an event horizon as the boundary of a black hole, "where gravity is just strong enough to drag light back, and prevent it escaping".
“Falling through the event horizon, is a bit like going over Niagara Falls in a canoe", he said. "If you are above the falls, you can get away if you paddle fast enough, but once you are over the edge, you are lost. There's no way back.
"As you get nearer the falls, the current gets faster. This means it pulls harder on the front of the canoe, than the back. There's a danger that the canoe will be pulled apart. It is the same with black holes.”
But now, Hawking is proposing 'apparent horizons' could exist instead, which would only hold light and information temporarily before releasing them back into space in 'garbled form', Nature has reported.
The internationally-renowned theoretical physicist suggests that quantum mechanics and general relativity remain intact, but black holes do not have an event horizon to catch fire.
They hypothesised that instead of being gradually ripped apart by gravitational forces, the event horizon would be transformed into a 'highly energetic region', and anyone who fell in would hit a wall of fire and burn to death in an instant - violating Albert Einstein's theory of relativity.
In his paper, Hawking writes: "The absence of event horizons means that there are no black holes - in the sense of regimes from which light can't escape to infinity."
He told Nature journal: “There is no escape from a black hole in classical theory, but quantum theory, however, “enables energy and information to escape from a black hole.”
Don Page, a physicist and expert on black holes at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada told Nature that "the picture Hawking gives sounds pretty reasonable".
“You could say that it is radical to propose there’s no event horizon", he said. "But these are highly quantum conditions, and there’s ambiguity about what space-time even is, let alone whether there is a definite region that can be marked as an event horizon.”
[h=1]The Proton Radius Puzzle[/h]Two experiments have come up with two wildly different values for the proton's radius. What's going on?https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?ur...-radius-puzzle/&text=The Proton Radius Puzzlehttp://www.facebook.com/sharer/shar...merican.com/article/the-proton-radius-puzzle/https://plus.google.com/share?url=h...merican.com/article/the-proton-radius-puzzle/http://www.reddit.com/submit
You would be forgiven for Assuming that we understand the proton. It is, after all, the main constituent of matter in the observable universe, the fuel of stellar furnaces. Studies of the proton—its positive charge suitably bound up with a negatively charged electron to make a hydrogen atom—initiated the quantum-mechanical revolution a century ago. Today researchers trigger torrents of ultrahigh-energy proton collisions to conjure particle exotica such as the Higgs boson.
Yet recent studies of the proton have surprised us. The two of us (Bernauer and Pohl), along with our colleagues, have made the most precise measurements of the radius of the proton to date, using two complementary experiments. When we began the exercise, we suspected that our results would help add levels of precision to the known size of the proton. We were wrong. Our measurements of the proton's radius differ by a huge gulf. The difference is more than five times the uncertainty in either measurement, implying that the probability that this is all due to chance is less than one in a million.
). I do keep up like any other laymen reading science periodicals.
