I first read about this in a nothing article that claimed, in the click bait title, that scientists were creating tiny black holes in fluid in the laboratory. After some searching, I found a better report about the use of fluids, specifically superfluid helium, to create an analog to black holes and the maths involved.
The first decent write-up was in
The Guardian {
https://www.theguardian.com/science...htubs-vortex-simulating-nottingham-university}, but I found a more serious science-based publication (I hope).
https://www.quantamagazine.org/she-turns-fluids-into-black-holes-and-inflating-universes-20221212/
There is a compelling argument that aligns with my own sense of the Universe around the reflective nature of physics in different mediums.
Weinfurtner and other analogue gravity experimenters make the controversial claim that by studying fluids here on Earth, we can glimpse truths about the physics of the most extreme and far-off phenomena in the universe.
Of course, not everything that seems similar on the surface is a good analog, but according to the article, the math is the same and they even have examples of what could be Hawkins Radiation appearing in the waveforms they generate.
I would like to point out, however, that a tub of frictionless fluid, a drain hole, gravity, and a surface medium are not analogous to 3-dimensional space in which black holes exist.
...the approach has critics, who say that the similar math governing these systems, although surprising, isn’t enough to allow one to stand in for the other.
A vortex created in the surface of water falling into a low pressure area is, for most mathematical models, a 2-D non-Euclidean geometry.
I asked, in my Geometries class, what would 3-D non-Euclidean space actually look like, because all our models were of 2-dimensional surfaces taken from 3-dimensional Euclidean space. One advanced fellow student answered my question with a complicated suggestion that it would be like the 2-D N-E space only rotated on a 90° axis. So, completely theoretical with no real world examples to play with.
Euclides developed his famous postulates and stopped short at his infamous parallel postulate, as though he somehow intuited non-Euclidean geometries and understood that the parallel postulate wouldn't hold under all cases. I don't think he intuited that, I think he understood ocean navigation. It doesn't take you very long sailing on the ocean before you realize that sailing the same course north from two different southern cities, will land you at two northern points that are closer together then the two cities from which you started (in the Northern hemisphere). Parallel courses, across a seemingly perfectly flat surface and your end points appear to be converging. We build malls and other such large construction projects today that demonstrate that four 90° corners don't create closing rectangular shapes when joined by straight and parallel walls on the surface of the Earth.
I've wandered a little.
Quantum field theory describes particles as excitations in underlying fields, like ripples in a pond. These fluctuations are then layered on top of a curved space-time background. “A lot of new cool physics emerges,” said Weinfurtner.
And, mysteriously, analogous cool physics arises in more familiar physical systems.
This I believe is often the case and the Universe is filled with appropriate analogies for more obscured phenomenon, and also metaphors for less physical aspects of life.
-Will
