Lifeboat Foundation

In an article published on her blog Sabine Hossenfelder suggests, not altogether tongue in cheek, that the results of a recent experiment by Jeff Steinhauer about Hawking radiation (full title of the paper “Observation of Thermal Hawking Radiation and its entanglement in an analogue black hole”) might earn a ‘return visit’ to Stockholm for Hawking in order to collect a Nobel Prize. I don’t think that Steinhauer’s work, impressive as it might seem, and as well presented as it is, will lead to any return visit to Stockholm for Stephen Hawking (or at least not anytime soon…), but I do think that a much more significant development is gathering pace that will have a far reaching effect on our understanding of the universe and provide a resolution to a long standing problem in theoretical physics thats just as important if not more important than winning a Nobel Prize.

I refer to Hawking’s brief comments made on August 25th at the Swedish Royal Institute for Technology at a conference on Hawking Radiation sponsored by the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physic s (NORDITA). Hawking’s comments were made during the course of a short (8 minute) presentation that could well end up being the most significant scientific advance made in the century since Einstein’s paper on General Relativity was published in November 1915. That’s no small claim, but one that is increasingly looking as if it has some serious merit.

This short note describes in a little more detail why I believe this to be the case.

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In August I went to Stephen Hawking’s public lecture in the fully packed Stockholm Opera. Hawking was wheeled onto the stage, placed in the spotlight, and delivered an entertaining presentation about black holes. The silence of the audience was interrupted only by laughter to Hawking’s well-placed jokes. It was a flawless performance with standing ovations.

In his lecture, Hawking expressed hope that he will win the Nobelprize for the discovery that black holes emit radiation. Now called “Hawking radiation,” this effect should have been detected at the LHC had black holes been produced there. But time has come, I think, for Hawking to update his slides. The ship to the promised land of micro black holes has long left the harbor, and it sunk – the LHC hasn’t seen black holes, has not, in fact, seen anything besides the Higgs.

But you don’t need black holes to see Hawking radiation. The radiation is a consequence of applying quantum field theory in a space- and time-dependent background, and you can use some other background to see the same effect. This can be done, for example, by measuring the propagation of quantum excitations in Bose-Einstein condensates. These condensates are clouds of about a billion or so ultra-cold atoms that form a fluid with basically zero viscosity. It’s as clean a system as it gets to see this effect. Handling and measuring the condensate is a big experimental challenge, but what wouldn’t you do to create a black hole in the lab?

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Black holes have long captured the public imagination and been the subject of popular culture, from Star Trek to Hollywood. They are the ultimate unknown – the blackest and most dense objects in the universe that do not even let light escape. And as if they weren’t bizarre enough to begin with, now add this to the mix: they don’t exist.

By merging two seemingly conflicting theories, Laura Mersini-Houghton, a physics professor at UNC-Chapel Hill in the College of Arts and Sciences, has proven, mathematically, that black holes can never come into being in the first place. The work not only forces scientists to reimagine the fabric of space-time, but also rethink the origins of the universe.

“I’m still not over the shock,” said Mersini-Houghton. “We’ve been studying this problem for a more than 50 years and this solution gives us a lot to think about.”

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A new study submitted to the Astrophysical Journal has claimed to have found evidence of interactions between our universe and other universes by looking at the cosmic microwave background (CMB). The scientist discovered an anomaly associated with some regions of the CMB, and he believes it is evidence for alternate universes.

Dr Ranga Chary, the author of the study, wrote that his observations could “possibly be due to the collision of our universe with an alternate universe whose baryon to photon ratio is a factor of about 65 larger than ours.” A pre-print of the study, which is yet to be peer reviewed, is available on ArXiv.

The CMB is the first light that shone in the universe. It was emitted 370,000 years after the Big Bang when the universe was cool enough for hydrogen to form and the original photons were free to move without getting absorbed by the primordial matter.

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The novel its a bit older, but it‘s an incredible vision!

When Star Trek’s Scotty warns the Captain that the engines can’t “take it”, he might just be best off switching fuel — a new book claims that humanity could reach the stars using vast spacecraft harnessing the energy of black holes with the power to “eat planets”.

Continue reading “Warp Factor 11 — ships powered by BLACK HOLES to ‘outpace Enterprise’, say scientists” »

Excerpt from This Book Is From the Future: A Journey Through Portals, Relativity, Wormholes and Other Adventures in Time Travel by Marie D. Jones & Larry Flaxman.

Time travel has enchanted and intrigued us since the earliest days of fiction, when authors such as H.G. Wells, Samuel Madden, Charles Dickens and Enrique Gaspar y Rimbau stretched and challenged our imaginations with images and tales of men and women who invented amazing machines and devices that could take them back in time, or forward into the future.

Because of the restrictions of light speed, and the paradoxes of going back to the past without damaging the future timeline, and a host of other obstacles and challenges, we, in fact, have remained stuck in the present.

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When a star wanders too close to a black hole, immense gravitational forces begin to rip it apart in an epic cosmic slaying called a “tidal disruption event.” Some of the star’s mass is flung outward into space, while the rest is drawn in, triggering a powerful flare that showers the sky with x-rays.

Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and other telescopes, a team of astronomers has now pieced together one such astronomical feasting frenzy. The event in question, appropriately named “ASASSN-14li,” was spotted near the center of PGC 043234, a galaxy that lies 290 million light years from Earth.

Continue reading “This Is What it Looks Like When a Black Hole Shreds a Star” »

SCIENTISTS conducting a mindbending experiment at the Large Hadron Collider next week hope to connect with a PARALLEL UNIVERSE outside of our own.

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According to Albert Einstein, the speed of light is an absolute constant beyond which nothing can move faster. So, how can galaxies be traveling faster than the speed of light if nothing is supposed to be able to break this cosmic speed limit?

I’m a little world of contradictions. “Not even light itself can escape a black hole,” and then, “black holes are the brightest objects in the Universe.” I’ve also said “nothing can travel faster than the speed of light”. And then I’ll say something like, “galaxies are moving away from us faster than the speed of light.” There’s more than a few items on this list, and it’s confusing at best. Thanks Universe!

Continue reading “How Is It Possible That Galaxies Are Moving Away From Us Faster Than the Speed of Light?” »