Okay. I'm going to have to bone up on the subject.
Black Holes
- Thread starter Blue Ghost
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Oh, I hadn't thought about virtual particles forming inside the event horizon. Of course. Is virtual particle formation influenced at all by matter density? I always think of it as a phenomenon of vacuum (since true vacuum violates the Uncertainty Principle). Density inside the event horizon is higher than the density outside it, so I would think that the Hawking Radiation inside would be lower than that outside.
But I only dabble in physics at a layman's level.
But I only dabble in physics at a layman's level.
I am too, but...
Cryton's an astronomy, physics and art triple major...
And we both try to keep up.
Yeah. I was an honors astrophysics major as a freshman, but quickly got out of it and went computer science. It's way more fun as a layman, trust me.
I think you've probably heard someone say something like 'Some black holes eject powerful jets of matter and energy' and subconciously parsed that as meaning 'Some black holes eject powerful jets of matter an energy from inside the event horizon'.
When people talk about black holes ejecting anything, they are talking about it as an astrophysical phenomenon including related structures, such as the accretion disk of material falling into it. Even Hawking radiation orriginates from outside the event horizon.
Simon Hibbs
That was the point on confusion. From all reports I had seen and heard there seemed to be an implication that the ejecta was coming from the black hole itself, and that the jets were of such force and velocity so as to escape the influence of the black hole from within the anomaly itself, and not from the outside.
To me that had all kinds of ramifications that I never saw nor heard addressed.
To me that had all kinds of ramifications that I never saw nor heard addressed.
Part of the problem with Black Holes is that we can see evidence of them, but not them. So, all we really have is a phenomenon of a circular rotation of matter in galaxies that implies (beyond a reasonable doubt) that an extremely high mass exists there.
This also happens to match up to Hawking's Theory of Black Holes. Dr. Hawking is the almost unquestioned expert - he saw the math and took it to its most logical conclusions. But as he's taken the thought experiment further, because the first parts fit beautifully with the later observations, he's gotten more afield of what is well believed.
To be blunt: the fringes of theoretical physics are only reasoned speculation expressed as mathematics. Much of Hawking's more recent musings are yet to be supported by observational data. Including Hawking Radiation.
Not all physicists agree with him about Hawking radiation. Some outright reject it.
A new approach to special relativity (DSR) can easily have gravity added to it, and when that's done, you get a new theory called "Gravity's Rainbow"... which runs counter to Hawking's more advanced portions of black hole theory. (see http://phys.org/news/2015-01-black-holes-space-theory.html )
Now, if Gravity's Rainbow is correct, Hawking's wrong about a number of elements. If Gravity's Rainbow is right, however, black holes don't have discrete event horizons, but instead get weirder still once they drop below a certain size, but information can still escape... and isn't destroyed at the event horizon. (According to Quantum Theory, no information can ever be destroyed completely; you should be able to run the universe backwards from the end state, if you could observe both vector and location, and generate the starting state.)
Almost all physicists and astronomers agree black holes exist. They don't all agree on what happens near them.
To be fair to Hawking, his ideas have evolved considerably over time as the field has advanced and has personally contributed to theories that have helped refute some of his previous speculations. If it turns out that Hawking Radiation isn't a real phenomenon, as long as our new understanding of black holes provides a better and more powerfully predictive model I don't think he'll be unhappy about that at all.
Simon Hibbs
Simon Hibbs
Jeff M. Hopper
SOC-14 1K
So, as an engineering practitioner, layman, and a Traveller gamer....
I have a few questions.
How much power does it take to create a black hole in terms of megawatts per unit mass? What mass are quantum black holes? How long does a quantum black hole last per unit mass before it evaporates? When a quantum black hole evaporates, how much energy is released?
I'm asking because I have an idle thought that these can be used and even weaponized. My initial concept is a particle accelerator quantum black hole source that then pumps a "beam" of quantum black holes down a gravitic accelerator barrel at a target at relativistic speeds so that the "beam" does not evaporate until it is at the target. I may have to refine the design, but need some help with the math.
I have a few questions.
How much power does it take to create a black hole in terms of megawatts per unit mass? What mass are quantum black holes? How long does a quantum black hole last per unit mass before it evaporates? When a quantum black hole evaporates, how much energy is released?
I'm asking because I have an idle thought that these can be used and even weaponized. My initial concept is a particle accelerator quantum black hole source that then pumps a "beam" of quantum black holes down a gravitic accelerator barrel at a target at relativistic speeds so that the "beam" does not evaporate until it is at the target. I may have to refine the design, but need some help with the math.
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
Shush - you are getting close to revealing the real workings of the 'meson' gun...
Jeff M. Hopper
SOC-14 1K
I can accept that....
You need to overcome the nuclear forces... Think about the energy release from fission... now, remember that that's one subdivision or two; now, reverse it, and run it up a few orders of magnitude...
I don't know the math, but note that the biggest supercolliders aren't able to make an atom much above an atomic mass in the 250 AMU range. They take upwards of 80 MW to generate a single atom in the 200+ AMU range. about 3e-25 kg.
The minimum mass for a black hole is thought to be the Plank Mass, about 22 μg (2.2e-7)... or about 1.3e21 AMU.
Hawking radiation makes sense to me. It just struck me as odd that with all of the quantum stuff happening at the core of the black hole itself, that there was still Newtonian stuff going on outside.
It makes one wonder about the boundary between quantum and Newtonian mechanics.
I'm going to have to write this up as an adventure 
If I understand black holes correctly, it is essentially a nexus of mass that is so compressed that it is essentially crushed to a point of creating a hyper-gravity field that allegorically acts as a pinch in the so-called "fabric" of space / "time".
I say so-called "fabric" because I don't think that description is accurate. It strikes me that the gravity is being severely stressed at that point to have the affects it is said to have, and that this interaction is stressing the more normal EM bonds that constitute mass on a subatomic level to the point of creating an energy sink as per Einstein's equation.
Ergo you get the "pinch" effect affecting only light and mass, and not so much empty space, i.e. "vacuum" itself being pinched off to form a true anomaly of nothingness, because there's still something there.
And if I see this reworded and published in a scientific journal after I, a lay amateur scientist, posted it here, I'll be unhappy :rant:
The observations and comments about space-time itself being stopped or otherwise warped, to me at least, is a matter of mis-perception because space-time implies that there's a "thing" that we and everything else exist on; i.e. almost a 19th or 18th century "ether" like idea. But, if that were true, then the effect would not stop simply after the event horizon, but, by definition, should be infinite in scope unless it were regulated by some other mechanism like gravity itself.
An interesting adventure is brewing.
I say so-called "fabric" because I don't think that description is accurate. It strikes me that the gravity is being severely stressed at that point to have the affects it is said to have, and that this interaction is stressing the more normal EM bonds that constitute mass on a subatomic level to the point of creating an energy sink as per Einstein's equation.
Ergo you get the "pinch" effect affecting only light and mass, and not so much empty space, i.e. "vacuum" itself being pinched off to form a true anomaly of nothingness, because there's still something there.
And if I see this reworded and published in a scientific journal after I, a lay amateur scientist, posted it here, I'll be unhappy :rant:
The observations and comments about space-time itself being stopped or otherwise warped, to me at least, is a matter of mis-perception because space-time implies that there's a "thing" that we and everything else exist on; i.e. almost a 19th or 18th century "ether" like idea. But, if that were true, then the effect would not stop simply after the event horizon, but, by definition, should be infinite in scope unless it were regulated by some other mechanism like gravity itself.
An interesting adventure is brewing.
And here's a link to my quandary about jets coming from black holes;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1HqOEbq2L4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1HqOEbq2L4
White holes are a mathematical curiosity, there's no known physical process that could create them. In fact the mathematical models only work if you assume the white hole has existed eternally - i.e. that they are in an eternal universe and are static, chargeless, rotationless and their existence extends infinitely into the past and future. Not a very realistic scenario.
That's quite different from black holes, which arose because they are the logical consequence of the collapse of large stars. So for black holes, we had a known real physical process, and followed the mathematics describing that process to it's logical conclusions. With white holes we have an abstract mathematical model, with no accompanying physical model.
Simon Hibbs
That's very curious. Can you point me to a reference on the subject?
Just as an aside; the theory about black holes being "conduits" or entrances to "tunnels" to other black holes (or perhaps even white holes), in my personal view, is nonsense. It seems to me that everything I know about physics from my engineering days and various documentaries on the subject, is that a black hole is a nexus of hyper dense mass, and nothing more.
That being the case, white holes seem exceptionally unlikely, as per your description of how they would need to manifest physically. Having said that, it does strike me as being primo adventure material for a sci-fi RPG. Even so, I have a hard time envisioning a thing that spits out ordered mass / energy.
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