Category Archives: science

science

Neutron Stars and Black Holes

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I was reading this article on the behavior of neutron stars and black holes being very similar with regard to accretion. This reminded me of a hypothesis I’ve had for a very long time. I will state it below.

Hypothesis

My hypothesis is that the compact object at the interior of the black hole is the same stuff as a high mass neutron star, whether you call that a quark star or whatever. The only difference is that the event horizon grows to engulf the entire object. This hypothesis may also exclude the existence of a singularity, although I’m not confident about that, as I will also explain.

Neutron Stars Grow Into Black Holes

When a neutron star accretes matter gradually, eventually there is enough mass to become a black hole. At that critical moment, is there a violent event? A non-violent event would suggest the interior of the black hole is unchanged from the neutron star that was its progenitor.

If the gradual accretion scenario is non-violent, it suggests there is no state change in the compact object itself. It is only the curvature of spacetime that changes, as the Swartzschild radius grows to engulf the entire object. A non-event suggests the nature of the compact object is unchanged. There is no release of energy.

Black Hole Singularity

The Swartzschild radius > 0 for a neutron star. Its interior within that radius already is subject to black hole spacetime curvatures without evidence of a singularity. Therefore, I disbelieve a singularity exists at all.

This also supports the idea that black holes and neutron stars are made of the same stuff. The growth of the Swartzschild radius is gradual with accretion. There isn’t a continuous series of violent events as the neutron star gains mass. Or is there? Maybe that explains the violent outbursts observed from neutron stars. This is known as a starquake. The neutron star compacting its material into a lower energy state. They think it is a surface phenomenon. I’m not so sure.

On the topic of a singularity, if the Swartzschild radius is already > 0, that means the innermost core of a neutron star is already a black hole. Is there any evidence of a singularity? What would such evidence look like to an outside observer? I read somewhere that the singularity is not necessarily a point in space, but can be thought of as a point in time. My mind struggles to imagine what that would mean. Given information cannot escape the event horizon except as Hawking radiation, we shouldn’t be able to observe any evidence of what is inside. Therefore, we cannot be certain.

Have I talked myself out of my hypothesis? No. If the final transition from neutron star to black hole is non-violent, I think it supports my claim. My hypothesis is also consistent with the current accepted explanation of starquake as a surface phenomenon. However, if a starquake results from gradual growth of the Swartzschild radius within a neutron star, I think that would falsify my claim. High energy events from the interior would suggest that there is a change in state of the stuff inside the neutron star.

science

Black Hole Information Loss

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I was watching Sabine Hossenfelder’s video titled I stopped working on black hole information loss. Here’s why. It inspired some ideas.

A black hole’s charge and angular momentum would cause a magnetic field (Maxwell’s Law) to accelerate accreting matter into relativistic jets, as we can observe. Matter spirals around, orbiting the black hole’s equator, and falls inward toward the black hole event horizon. Some or all of this in-falling matter is redirected to jets firing out from the poles of black hole, and this matter is accelerated to relativistic speeds (near the speed of light). This involves a huge transfer of energy from the black hole to the matter from the accretion disc.

Could that transfer of energy carry information away from the black hole? Maybe this hypothesis isn’t sufficient by itself to explain how a black hole’s mass shrinks — only how its angular momentum slows.

We can also hypothesize the magnetic field is strong enough to produce pairs of particles that add to the jets. Photons of the magnetic field collide to create electron-positron pairs. Now we have a mechanism, pair production, for mass to escape the black hole in a manner that is distinct from Hawking (thermal) radiation. That would be how information flows out, so it is not lost.

science

Black hole jets – how do they work?

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In my hubris, I sometimes write emails to established scientists with my stupid ideas. I have a knack for formulating what I believe to be good questions. Here is what I sent to Netta Engelhardt at MIT this morning on the topic of black hole jets.

I appreciate the videos you’ve done on YouTube on black holes.

Some rhetorical questions come to mind. I don’t expect an answer. My intention is to ask them, in case they help stimulate some curiosity toward maybe forming a useful idea.

  1. How much of the mass that is falling into a black hole adds to the mass of the black hole, versus being ejected, say through its jets?
  2. Can we think of the jets as carrying information away from the black hole, given that the BH is accelerating the outbound particles substantially, thereby transferring energy from it?
  3. Wouldn’t (2) then be consistent with a model whereby all information about the BH is thought to be encoded on its boundary, for accreted matter to be seen as sticking to the boundary as it falls in, and over time that same information migrating to the poles of the BH and ejected through its jets?

It just seems to me, as a layman, that black hole jets are such a prominent feature, but I haven’t seen much talk about what mechanisms generate these jets, and what are their relationships to the flow of energy and information into and out of the black hole.

politics, science

climate change – how to think about it

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While I am not a climate scientist and do not claim to have any special expertise in climate research, my interest is to analyze how a layman should organize his thoughts around this complex topic. Apply critical thinking to separate truth from propaganda and political posturing about climate change.

We have seen the media and leading voices on the topic of climate change promote the following ideas:

The term “denial” conflates healthy skepticism over extraordinary claims with the non-recognition of scientific facts that are largely beyond dispute. Extraordinary claims are certainly under dispute by experts in their fields, and the disingenuous label of “denial” is intended to chill skepticism. Skepticism is a hallmark of science. Authoritarian dogma (“settled science”) is the antithesis of science. Here is a sampling of dissent:

The case being made by the climate change activists contains several elements:

  1. Global temperatures have been rising at an alarming rate since the beginning of the industrial revolution. This is where science investigates the facts through measurements that are indisputable except for accuracy, error, and methods to ensure that the data is true. Unfortunately, even at this fundamental level certain scientists have exhibited misbehavior (Climategate), such as data manipulation, lack of transparency of unaltered data sets, what those data alterations were, exclusion of participants from peer review, exclusion of participants from publications, and suppression of dissent. While such misbehavior undermines the credibility of the science, on net the evidence does support the position that global temperatures have risen 1.2°C since the pre-industrial era.
  2. Warming is predominantly caused by increased CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. The strongest argument in favor of attributing the cause of warming to CO2, as opposed to solar activity and any number of variables that affect the phenomena under measurement (e.g., proxies to temperature such as tree rings are sensitive to many factors like sunlight, rainfall, soil conditions, nutrients, and pestilence which cannot be separated from the effects of temperature), is the observation that surface temperatures have risen as lower stratospheric temperatures have dropped, which is predicted if greenhouse warming due to CO2 is the cause.
  3. Warming is unprecedented and unnatural.  This is where science can provide insights into historical events and patterns. Articles such as Nature Unbound III: Holocene climate variability (Part A) and Part B give some perspective into natural trends over millennia that show large temperature variations and atmospheric CO2 levels that are natural and uncorrelated.
  4. Rising atmospheric CO2 levels are the result of emissions from burning fossil fuels, and therefore human activity is to blame. There can be little dispute that the post-industrial rise in atmospheric CO2 is primarily attributable to human activity.
  5. Elevated atmospheric CO2 levels and associated warming are bad.Melting glaciers, rising sea levels, increases in extreme weather events, disruptions of ocean currents, ocean acidification, and even mass extinctions are potential hazards that climate alarmists are warning of. These claims are strongly disputed [1][2][3][4]. Measuring a global trend and determining the cause are problematic. On the other hand, there  is a fair amount of research that suggests that global warming has been beneficial.
  6. Rising atmospheric CO2 levels and warming trend will be catastrophic. Predictions of catastrophic levels of warming are based on climate models, which have had a very poor track record to date. Models have made predictions that do not comport with observations.
  7. Intervention is required to curtail human activity that emits CO2.
  8. Government policies are the proper means of intervention.
  9. The specific policies being advocated are the best solutions to prevent catastrophe and provide the best net benefit.

By the time we reach the final three claims about solutions, we must have already drawn conclusions from the previous six that global warming is catastrophic and predominantly caused by CO2  emissions from human activities. Any critical examination of the evidence would not support such a conclusion.  The case for climate alarmism falls apart at the third claim. The evidence favors the Lukewarmers, “those who argue that carbon dioxide indeed is warming surface temperatures, but that its effect is modest and that we are inadvertently adapting”. However, let’s roll with the “hotheads” to see where they want to lead us.

When exploring practical solutions, we move beyond scientific research into the realm of engineering, which is applied science. How to solve the problem can either be compatible with liberty – relying on voluntary action; or the solutions can rely on coercion and force through government action. This falls into the political realm.

When evaluating how best to deploy scarce resources (e.g., labor, factors of production, capital investment) among various alternative solutions, we move beyond the physical sciences into the realm of economics, which is a social science. Humans cannot be treated as inanimate objects without free will, rationality, and rights.

Government policies cannot be implemented without expecting people to resist, avoid, or bypass them. Policies cannot anticipate how human ingenuity and innovation can provide better solutions; or how policies may impair such solutions from being developed, as crony regulations that protect incumbents and government “picking winners”  have a tendency to do.

Government funding of scientific research has conflicts of interest. You tend to get the results that you pay for, because researchers understand that their funding will only continue if the government’s favored outcomes are achieved and their policy goals are supported.

Government funding of their preferred solutions results in cronyism. Let’s examine green energy subsidies. Here are some examples:

If climate change advocates cared about practical solutions to replacing CO2 emitting energy generation, they would support modern and future nuclear power technologies. This topic is explored in the article titled What are some policies that would improve millions of lives, but people still oppose?

What climate alarmists leave unsaid is their aim to scale back human activity to reduce the impact on the environment. It is a greater priority to preserve wilderness than to improve the standard of living for humans. People have no right to exist in their world view.

The popular movement against climate change is not primarily about science. Its main aim is political advocacy. That is, scientific arguments are used to support the political lobbying for government mandated economic solutions to future problems that are predicted by models based on the scientific explanations of physical phenomena that contribute to climate. In the realm of political debate and economics, the physical sciences are just a useful idiot, where cherry-picked results are used to promote the preferred policy goals. Popular opinion is driven by the desired political outcome, not by the truth of the science. Their goal is to shift power away from individuals seeking to improve their standard of living, and concentrating power in governments to implement collectivist policies that are used to implement cronyism and corruption.

science

black hole and big bang singularities

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Here is Ben’s theory about the impossibility of black hole and big bang singularities.

I think once we understand the Higgs mechanism better, we will discover that above a certain temperature, which rises as we work backward in time to make the universe more dense, the opposite of “condensation” happens. The bosons no longer have mass. No mass, no gravity; no longer contributing gravity means the very force that is squeezing things together stops squeezing at the core. I believe this should put a limit on how dense things can be, so it is impossible to form a singularity, if you cannot pass this density limit at the extreme interior.

I wish I knew a lick of math, so I could even comprehend what SU(2) × U(1) means. Sadly, I’ll have no chance of writing a paper and winning a Nobel prize. Math is hard.

science

faster than light travel

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The article NASA May Have Accidentally Created a Warp Field is getting people excited about faster than light travel.

You don’t need to travel faster than light to go arbitrarily far in arbitrarily less time. All you need to do is travel closer to the speed of light. As you get closer to c, time dilation and space contraction will contribute to bring arbitrarily distant destinations within reach. Although the travelers will experience relatively manageable passages of time, it is their friends observing from home who will age much more quickly. Travelers moving at nearly c in space have most of their velocity contributing to movement through space dimensions and almost none through time. At home, we are moving at c almost entirely in the time dimension, remaining motionless in space. The laws of physics give everything no option but to move at c through spacetime; we can only choose what part of our motion is through the space dimensions and the remainder is through time.

The benefits imagined from warping space are to alleviate this huge difference in the passage of time, so that travelers can go places and return without generations dying off before they return home. The “faster than light” travel is about how outside observers perceive the traveler’s motion, so that they can share in the experience within their lifetimes. Travelers have no need for FTL motion to reach any destination within their own lifetime, with enough acceleration to move at close to c through space. The desire for FTL motion is for non-travelers who don’t want to die waiting for the travelers to return.

science

The search for intelligent life

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The search for intelligent life outside of our solar system is a difficult one. We tend to think that if we expand the scope of our search to include more galaxies, this is sufficient. But we must accept that even if we had the technology to examine every galaxy exhaustively in perfect detail, we are only covering a minuscule part of the search space, which is almost entirely inaccessible to us by the laws of physics.

We can only see something in the current snapshot in time. Let’s try to imagine a search for human radio signals on Earth from the perspective of a distant alien civilization. The Earth is 4.4 billion years old. Humans started producing radio signals in 1894, so these radio signals have been transmitting for the past 121 years. These signals have only had the opportunity to propagate 121 light years away from Earth in that time. Beyond that distance, no alien civilization would be able to detect these signals. Moreover, an alien civilization would have to coincidentally have developed at a pace in which their technology was at least as advanced at exactly the right time to detect such signals during this tiny window in time upon their arrival. This is a 121 year window out of the 13.82 billion years in which the universe has existed.

science

Universal rest frame

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I wonder whether there is a preferred rest frame in the universe. What are the implications, if there isn’t one? I have questions.

Sometimes we see stories about searching for the origins of high energy particles called cosmic rays. These are massive particles like protons, which have been accelerated by something in deep space to nearly the speed of light. The usual suspects are black holes, neutron stars, supernovae, and other exotic phenomena. The puzzling thing is that some of these particles seem to have traveled great distances, farther than thought possible without losing momentum (slowing down by bumping into things like photons).

What I wonder is whether the human perspective on Earth is far too biased. Einstein’s theory of special relativity says that there is no preferred rest frame in the universe. A fast moving particle is moving fast relative to us, but it is equally valid to say that the particle is at rest, and it is we who are moving fast relative to it.

If indeed there is no preferred rest frame in the universe, shouldn’t there be a uniform distribution of velocities for distant galaxy clusters? Because of the strong influence of gravity, galaxies within a cluster would be bound to move together. But galaxies that are not close enough together will move independently. Wouldn’t one expect that two galaxies separated in space and time by 12 billion light years have an equal probability of moving at any speed between zero and c relative to each other?

However, indeed our picture of the universe seems to be of a relatively organized structure like a web of filaments, possibly with a flow in a particular direction. It is far more accurate to describe the structure as static than it is to say that it is randomly moving with a uniform distribution of velocities. This means there is a definite bias for a rest frame, where the relative motion of the large scale structure of the universe is minimized. Am I wrong?

science

Cosmic inflation unnecessary

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There is no time without clocks. There are no clocks without mass. There is no mass above the temperature at which bosons acquire mass through spontaneous symmetry breaking. Massless particles travel at the speed of light. When traveling at the speed of light, all components of its motion are through space and none are through time. All events in the universe become space-like.

Wouldn’t these conditions of the early universe by themselves explain the homogeneous and isotropic qualities without needing cosmic inflation? If energy can radiate arbitrarily far in space without time passing, there is no need for esoteric explanations of how that happened so quickly.

[Paraphrasing Penrose: E=mc^2 combined with E=hf (and f=1/t) means that without mass there can be no clocks and therefore no time.]

science

dark matter – skepticism

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I remain skeptical of both dark matter and dark energy. I don’t believe that either are valid concepts. They are hypothesized as explanations for observations that defy the current theories of how ordinary matter and energy ought to behave. I don’t have an argument to disprove either concept, but I do believe the burden of proof is on those who assert the existence of dark matter and dark energy. In this article, I would like to present an alternative theory to explain the anomalous behavior that proponents of dark matter use to support their hypothesis.

We must begin with an introduction to the topic of dark matter. One of the reasons that dark matter is hypothesized is to explain the unexpected rotational speeds of galaxies. In spiral galaxies like our own, the stars orbiting closer to the central super-massive black hole should appear to orbit very quickly, while the stars orbiting farther away should move much more slowly. The stars should behave as the planets do in our solar system. But they don’t. The galaxy rotates more like a wheel.

A wheel rotates the way it does because it is solid. The molecules that make up the solid are far apart, and the spaces between them are enormous. It is the electrostatic forces forming the bonds between molecules that are so strong that the molecules maintain a rigid structure.

Perhaps the stars within a galaxy travel together like a solid. Could the mutual gravitation between neighboring stars be strong enough to hold them together in a somewhat rigid configuration? That seems more plausible than to view the stars as orbiting the central super-massive black hole.

The Milky Way has a mass of ~1,250 billion solar masses. Its super-massive black hole, Sagittarius A*, has a mass of 4.1 million solar masses. Compare these proportions to the Solar System, where the Sun at 2 * 10^30 kg is more than 1000 times larger than the planets at less than 2 x 10^27 kg combined. The Sun’s dominant mass explains why the planets orbit the Sun. Sgr A* is puny relative to the stars in the galaxy. Perhaps this is why the mutual gravitation of neighboring stars would hold them in a nearly rigid configuration, and these influences would dominate over the gravitational force of the central super-massive black hole.

I don’t have the math skills to test that hypothesis. But it’s fun to wonder about such things in the hopes that someone with skills might think of the same idea and publish a legitimate version of the theory.