In Star Trek Voyager, the ship finds itself trapped inside the event horizon of a Black Hole. They escape, of course, but I doubt that would be possible in real life.I just watched this Youtube video on Black Holes and it reminded me of that episode. Which is not important, of course, or even germane to this thread. The video does a great job of talking about them. When I was a kid, these were theoretical curiosities. Slowly, over the decades, they have gained importance, and now we think every galaxy has a big one in it's center. Some galaxies have supermassive Black holes with a mind boggling amount of stuff in it. I think that may be a limitation of language. If it's a singularity, everything squished down to a single point, why aren't they all the same size? Anyway, I digress.
What's different size is the event horizon - the "shell" around the black hole which defines the point after which it requires greater than light speed to escape. If the black hole is more massive, then the event horizon has a larger diameter. What goes on inside the event horizon is conjecture, since no information can escape.
Everything squishes down to a single point. For starters, a point is a locator with no dimensions. It's a location. So, there is no "same size."
The usual pattern here is for an anomoly to be found and then to have the various string theory groups all propose string theory based explanations. Then, those working on the actual finding identify errors in measurement, intervening dust clouds, probable patches of dark matter, affects found by searching the literature, or whatever. In general, string theory hasn't been all that successful and has far less support than it once did. One thing about scientists - they absolutely can NOT hold back what excites them. Science is collaborative. So, early unreviewed results, exciting suspicions, directions of continued study, etc., etc. are everywhere. What then happens is the serious work of duplication, cross checking, peer review, etc. Phosphine on Venus is another great eample. It wasn't hype. It was just too early in the process.
How interesting that science that is settled with so many things like old universe, old earth, global warming and other things now debunks black holes. Of course, many scientists also are debunking string theory as well. Fuzzballs. Pretty soon we will discover that under the surface of the moon is 100% CHEESE!
You are really not up to date on anything. It's all falling apart as strings generally do. I already debunked your quackery on old earth with Chimps. You really want to get embarrassed today, don't you
Okay! But could you tell us, in your own words, how string theory is being debunked? You don't have to get technical.
Coll video, too bad you never watched it. So.... why is it "wrong"? That video wasn't a debunk, by the way.
Gained acceptance rather than importance, I would suggest. How is it important to know or understand black holes? It's similar I think to folks that make the assertion about paintings being important. Banksy vs. Hawking?
Maybe, but that's the thing with science, you don't usually know going in how things will turn out. So it might remain a purely academic concern, or result in some profound technological advance.
Is it just barely possible Black Holes don't exist? In the early days of modern science, when they first formulated the Gas Laws, there was a point where they observed that these laws dictated that at a certain point of temperature and/or pressure (completely unreachable at the time) the volume of the gas would become 0. And from this came the question, was there an "ideal gas" a substance that would blink out of existence if it became cold enough? Now of course it never happened. All gases become liquids and some even solids long before they reach that point. My point is they were figuring this entirely according to their calculations and isn't that what they are doing with Black Holes now? Could it be that if you have that much matter at one point that something else happens, something we just don't know about because we have never observed those conditions and probably never will? OTOH, that's what they mean by calling it a "singularity" isn't it? (Emily Latella Voice) Never Mind.
Is that why Helium can never be made solid? I have heard that has to with the fact that Helium requires so little motion of its atoms that quantum uncertainty is enough to provide it, and was always interested by this further proof of that strange supposition.
It important because it is a method of testing and refining relativity. All of our global communications, for example, rely on relativity. All of our space travel and exploration does as well. Also, while understanding black holes, we discover new methods of mathematics and of observation that become useful in many other ways.
I don't really know much about low temperature physics to be honest. Ohm's Law, V=IR fails at low temperatures only in superconductor materials because R decreases to zero, or vanishes. The Ideal Gas Law, PV = ZnRT fails because, hmmm, interesting - I can't really explain why this fails, other than maybe that there aren't hardly any elements, atoms, or molecules which are in the gas phase down around absolute zero.
Yes, thanks to my time here at PF, I've learned that GPS accuracy isn't possible without applying time corrections based on Einstein's relativity theory. Fascinating stuff. http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~pogge/Ast162/Unit5/gps.html Here is a current location that seems to be the document referenced in the broken link on the above page, https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a516975.pdf *** Black hole theory and math is interesting stuff and maybe it is important. I am certain we don't know lot's of stuff including stuff that we don't know we don't know. I think it exceedingly unlikely that the universe expands forever, for example. I think that the only thing that explains things is that eventually, sometime in the infinite future, gravity and black holes and dark matter and whatever eventually pull the entire universe into a little hot dot that blows up and starts it all over again. It's the only thing that seems to make any sense to me.
Here's something I saw in the news today micro blackholes: World's largest atom smasher could seed microscopic black holes | Space Fortunately, we haven't been affected by these tiny black holes so far, so it appears to be safe.
For some reason my post #14 is not showing the black hole image from NASA. So I'm going to try again, it's a pretty sweet work of art itself, imo. https://images.nasa.gov/details-behemoth-black-hole-found-in-an-unlikely-place_26209716511_o.html
Scientists would LOVE for that to be the case. They thought it was probably true, when they first devised a method to check. However, all obervations so far point to expansion until heat death, not least of which is the accelerating expansion rate of the universe.
