Three cosmic enigmas, one audacious answer [bye-bye to black holes?]

New Scientist ^ | March 9, 2006 | Zeeya Merali

[wafflehouse]

very interesting stuff!

[chmst]

ping

[1stMarylandRegiment]

Aren't tiny black holes supposed to evaporate?

I though Hawking said black HOES . . .

DOH!

[ccmay]

I'm sure when historians look back, they'll wonder why people didn't question these contradictions.

Whenever you think that you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.
-- Francisco d'Anconia

That's how science advances. After the Michelson-Morley experiments, Einstein questioned long-accepted premises about the universal constancy of time and the Euclidean geometry of space, resulting in the theories of special and general relativity.

-ccm

[Ichneumon]

"We start with effects actually seen in the lab, which I think gives it more credibility than black holes," says Chapline. With this idea in mind, they - along with Emil Mottola at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, Pawel Mazur of the University of South Carolina in Columbia and colleagues - analysed the collapse of massive stars in a way that did not allow any violation of quantum mechanics. Sure enough, in place of black holes their analysis predicts a phase transition that creates a thin quantum critical shell. The size of this shell is determined by the star's mass and, crucially, does not contain a space-time singularity. Instead, the shell contains a vacuum, just like the energy-containing vacuum of free space.

It sounds to me that they're not actually *replacing* the idea of black holes with something else that's not a black hole, what they're really saying is that the physics of black holes might be different than previously thought, especially "inside" the black hole.

[Ichneumon]

"People have been vaguely uncomfortable about these problems for a while, but they figured they'd get solved someday," says Chapline. "But that hasn't happened and I'm sure when historians look back, they'll wonder why people didn't question these contradictions."

His second statement isn't quite fair -- as shown by his first statement, people *have* questioned the contradictions, but there's not much you can do about them until you manage to come up with a good way to resolve them. And often it can take a long time for the right "aha!" insight to arrive.

[snarks_when_bored]

It sounds to me that they're not actually *replacing* the idea of black holes with something else that's not a black hole, what they're really saying is that the physics of black holes might be different than previously thought, especially "inside" the black hole.

Well, as the passage you quoted states, at the heart of a black hole (should such there be) there's a spacetime singularity. That would not be the case for the Chapline dark energy star, inside of which there is vacuum but no singularity. Also, the event horizon of a black hole isn't made of any sort of 'stuff', while the quantum critical shell of a Chapline star would be. These are significant differences and would likely be enough to force a name change, don't you think?

[AndrewC]

"It's like we are living inside a giant dark energy star,"

And it is becomer "gianter"!!

[AndrewC]

mer = ming

[Kirkwood]

"Because information about the matter is lost forever, this conflicts with the laws of quantum mechanics, which state that information can never disappear from the universe."

Holey moley... Where in the heck did this guy study astrophysics? He needs to get a refund on his education. The matter isn't lost. It still exists in the universe. It is simply sucked down to the bottom of a gravity well (black hole) and in fact creates that very same gravity well. If there was no matter tucked away inside of a black hole, it wouldn't have such a strong gravity well.

[snarks_when_bored]

"Because information about the matter is lost forever, this conflicts with the laws of quantum mechanics, which state that information can never disappear from the universe."

Holey moley... Where in the heck did this guy study astrophysics? He needs to get a refund on his education. The matter isn't lost. It still exists in the universe.

Ummm, the writer says that information about the matter is lost, not the matter itself.

[NJ_gent]

From reading the article, I get the feeling these guys have never heard of Hawking, let alone read his work. I'm not saying they're wrong (that would be awfully presumptuous of me), but the article certainly doesn't explain how they discount Hawking's black hole work so readily. For one thing, Hawking worked out how information could be maintained within a black hole by examining it in multiple dimensions.

[PatrickHenry]

SciencePing

An elite subset of the Evolution list. See the list's explanation at my freeper homepage. Then FReepmail to be added or dropped.

[F.J. Mitchell]

Three cosmic enemas? We don't allow that kinky stuff on FR! Callimg all Moderators!

[bvw]

[T]heir analysis predicts a phase transition that creates a thin quantum critical shell. The size of this shell is determined by the star's mass and, crucially, does not contain a space-time singularity. Instead, the shell contains a vacuum, just like the energy-containing vacuum of free space. As the star's mass collapses through the shell, it is converted to energy that contributes to the energy of the vacuum.

The team's calculations show that the vacuum energy inside the shell has a powerful anti-gravity effect, just like the dark energy that appears to be causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate. Chapline has dubbed the objects produced this way "dark energy stars".

Sweet. Now question is begged, where did all OUR vacuum energy come from? Bye bye multiverse. (Specualtion on my part.)

[snarks_when_bored]

I suppose you're referring to Hawking's September, 2005, paper: Information Loss in Black Holes. I've not read it, but I read a discussion of it on Peter Woit's blog: Hawking in Dublin. The upshot of that discussion was that the details of what Hawking is proposing need firming up. In the meantime, Chapline and his collaborators are going their own way, no doubt aware that Hawking and others are working on the information loss problem, but believing that they're onto something themselves.

[Physicist]

Every week, New Scientist announces some breakthrough that overturns all of physics.

As for this stuff, I'm not expert enough to critique it, but my physics sense isn't getting the warm fuzzies. A black hole is a dead-simple geometric effect that pops out of General Relativity. It's really difficult to avoid having them, in fact. And while it's true that quantum mechanics isn't exactly comfortable with them, there's no way we'll know the correct reconciliation until we have a theory of quantum gravity in hand. Without that theory, I don't see how these gentlemen could have stumbled across the correct explanation.

And since they say that if we could study one close-up, the difference between a black hole and a "dark energy star" would be very subtle, I think I'm better off sticking with the simple, well-studied model instead of this abstruse one. (That's not to say they're wrong; just that their idea doesn't seem useful right now.)

[thoughtomator]

Ah, the little-known Hawkins Theory of Pimpin'.

[snarks_when_bored]

Yes, I take your point (follow the link to Motl's amusing critique of Chapline's work). I do think, though, that there's something to be said for encouraging a variety of approaches to fundamental questions. Just on principle.

[doc30]

This is very interesting stuff. I do like how someone is trying to incorporate quantum mechanics into the description of black holes. That is a very important, and fundamental, description. Perhaps this is an small, incremental step to reconcilling quantum mechanics with relativity. I suppose it won't be a clear reconcilliation until we can probe events at the Plack scale and maybe, detect and deduce any quantum nature of space. Personally, I am more comfortable with this explanation than envoking a singularity and not fully accounting for quantum properties of matter. Anyone know if the Large Hadreon Collider will be able to probe events in these energy scales? I thought I heard it could create mini black holes. If so, there is room for experiments in this area.