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This is in the NYTimes this morning. Thought it might be of interest.
quote:"I'm sorry to disappoint science fiction fans, but if information is preserved there is no possibility of using black holes to travel to other universes." DR. STEPHEN W. HAWKING
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July 14th - www.newscientist.com reported this initially, and that Hawking would be talking on July 21st at the ICGRG.
The story was also on Yahoo yesterday - that's where I printed it from!
I'm not too concerned over the sf implications - I didn't think the black hole info went to another universe anyway!!! This will just give people other stuff to write about. I've got one story idea already on paper from this!
And, if stuff can escape from a black hole, I think that gives the possibility for stable wormhole travel a boost. At least for something else I'm working on
quote:This will just give people other stuff to write about.
Actually, this is oddly similar to something I have in the story I'm marketing. But it does give me some food for thought for the sequel. Posts: 1810 | Registered: Jun 2002
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I'm not entirely clear on why people thought you ever could use black holes to travel to other universes...
Posts: 3567 | Registered: May 2003
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quote:I'm not entirely clear on why people thought you ever could use black holes to travel to other universes...
Simply, some scientists / mathematicians wondered and theorized if such a compressed mass could possibly rip a hole into a new universe or possibly even create a new, albeit tinier, one. That's all.
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But the idea that a traveler could survive a journey through a black hole and out some other side is a little hard to imagine.
What I thought black holes punching through to some other place in the universe might be good for was as an energy source, especially if you could have a black hole punch through in teeny tiny places--white holes small enough to power a whole planet or less, perhaps?
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I thought you got squished if you entered a black hole. So even if it tore a hole to another universe, all that would end up there would be some messy bits... so maybe Hawking has it right and wrong - stuff comes out of a black hole, INTO another place. But we'd have to die to know (and I'm not dying to know).
I also had thoughts on energy from a black hole - wanted to harvest it for something. Talked with rickfisher and his daughter at Balticon about it - could be done, maybe not next year. So now I might be going another route, or not. Have another story or two to finish first, and am still waiting for a return e-mail from the author who said she would send something if she could (but said it would be a while, so I'm not worried).
quote:But the idea that a traveler could survive a journey through a black hole and out some other side is a little hard to imagine.
Ah... you've not read Geoffrey A. Landis' short story Approaching Perimelasma then? An interesting and clever take on journeying into (and through) a black hole. In essence, there is more than one way to skin a cat.
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I think the biggest thing to remember is that no one has actually been to a black hole...I know a few years back the idea of a black hole was termed as "ridiculous". So while they may be right, they may be wrong as well.
I don't know how they can determine anything until someone comes back from one and can say for sure.
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There are no actual skinnings of cats in the story, Kathleen.
Okay, so a human being couldn't enter a black hole, right? Nor could you send a machine or probe. What if you had the technology to make a super-computer the size of a pinpoint? And then constructed a tiny body no bigger than a millimeter to utilize that "brain" and also downloaded a copy of your brain into it. Put all of that into a tiny ship and head off into a black hole.
While there would still be enormous risk, one might - if they were lucky - surive a trip into a black hole... This new "body" and ship would be a "million times more resistant to being stretched to spaghetti." If you did survive and return home safely, you could then upload your data into your human brain. Or something like that...
[This message has been edited by HSO (edited July 23, 2004).]
[This message has been edited by HSO (edited July 23, 2004).]
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"So, black holes have gone from possible gateway to stellar garbage disposal? What a shift." -- Keeley
Actually, a stellar garbage disposal isn't a bad idea.
But I like the thought of black holes as a space equivilent to the Sarlacc Pit. It would be a nice place to send enemy craft for punishment. The people inside would be crushed to death by pressure. A good method for villians to use in exicutions.
Before you are squished to bits, you are fried by x-rays and gamma rays, and torn to shreds by the tidal forces - then your fried shreds are squished to bits, whatever doesn't end up in the accretion disk and actually gets past the event horizon. . .
Still, does sound like a pretty cool method for execution! Or even interrogation - dangling them just outside the 2xSchwarzschildD boundary, threatening to put them past the limit. "Ok, ok, I'll talk, you don't have to get nasty."
[This message has been edited by punahougirl84 (edited July 24, 2004).]
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Wouldn't it be kind of like the "Dirty Harry" method of threatening someone?
"I don't know and you don't know what will actually happen to you in that black hole. Maybe time will stretch out so that it will feel like forever before you die. Maybe your dying will take forever. Maybe you won't even notice it happening, or maybe you will. How lucky do you feel?"
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The added info about the terrors of what would happen in a black hole ("Before you are squished to bits, you are fried by x-rays and gamma rays, and torn to shreds by the tidal forces - then your fried shreds are squished to bits, whatever doesn't end up in the accretion disk and actually gets past the event horizon. . .") would just make my exicution idea more threatening.
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That is interesting. What if you sent all the bad guys into the black hole thinking they are dead, but all you really did was unleash them on an unsespecting universe?
Posts: 1895 | Registered: Mar 2004
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That's exactly what he's just proven cannot happen.
I have to admit, though, that I'm a bit puzzled. Hawking expressed the concept of "Hawking radiation"--a quantum effect that allows sub-atomic particles to escape the event horizon as radiation--years ago. He also determined that the black hole would eventually "evaporate" because of this radiation, which carries energy/mass out of the black hole.
I'm guessing that this is some abstruse result of information theory instead, as the quote above suggests.
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I think the ideas still work together. The thought had been that nothing can escape (except the radiation, which is coming off the accretion disk I believe, the stuff around the black hole - far enough away I guess that it can come off) - so the possibility existed that what went in could end up in another universe. But if what enters it comes out mangled HERE then it isn't going anywhere else, and you can't use the black hole (Kerr version obviously!)to go anywhere.
Eventual evaporation probably assumes there is nothing more (substantially) to "feed" the black hole. I'm wondering if this means "dark matter" doesn't feed black holes - I know there is supposedly negative energy connection, but am still trying to work that out in my head.
Put the bad guys close enough, and they aren't coming back alive.
Plus, you still have to figure out where the mangled bits come out - and how do we get evidence that that is happening? I wonder if that might be part of the more detailed paper Hawking is putting out next month.
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Well from where I stand the science should serve the story. I know there are those the other way around, and that's the spice of life. But as much as I respect Steven Hawking I wouldn't want to read a Sci-Fi novel by him. (but I love His Sci-Fac)
Posts: 1895 | Registered: Mar 2004
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If what goes into a black hole comes out as energy or mangled matter somewhere else, I'd like to know what it would look like. I haven't heard about anything in our part of space that could be evidence of the other end of a black hole from somewhere else. (I remember thinking at one time that quasi-stellar objects might possibly be the other end--aka white holes--but I think they figured out what those are, and they don't fit.)
Posts: 8826 | Registered: A Long Time Ago!
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Okay, I think that in essence, the matter/energy comes out as Hawking radiation. There is a sort of quantum effect where a particle can jump faster than light for some distance right after certain quantum interactions, like a particle-anti-particle split.
One particle jumps further into the singularity, the other particle jumps a pretty arbritrary distance out from the event horizon. This accounts for mass/energy release.
Information is released from the black hole at the same time, because apparently there are rules that dictate what direction the particle will go based on where (?) it was inside the singularity...or something, particle velocity and whatnot.
Anyway, the matter/energy comes out everywhere, not at some discrete point.
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