The Nature of the Universe, Time Travel and More...

[Will The Serious]

If virtual particles appear and disappear by annihilating each other couldn’t you infer that they may have a short half- life?
Couldn’t another pair come into existence and annihilate both positive particles?
Just a thought.

don't get caught up in the considerable time Asbo's linked article spent explaining the erroneous analogy of Hawkins Radiation. It took me a while to separate the two explanations and grasp the asserted true theory; not that I actually grasp it. It does not seem, to me, like the theory really explains black hole evaporation so much as describes what happens as evaporation occurs.
Hawking's Black Hole Theorem Observationally Confirmed

From outside a black hole, all the infalling matter will emit light and is always visible, while nothing from behind the event horizon can get out. But if you were the one who fell into a black hole, your energy could conceivably re-emerge as part of a hot Big Bang in a newborn Universe. How do black holes evaporate from Hawking radiation? - Big Think

Have you ever vacuumed a floor and seen particles shoot out, away, from the vacuum head? There are times when matter is pulled "fall" towards a point, and before they get irretrievably caught, gain momentum to break away from the pull and are accelerated enough, with the added energy, to escape, taking that energy with them. Of course, this is much harder to talk about for gravity, with terms like force, acceleration, and energy, because they become ambiguous in application due to the concept of curved space-time.

-Will

 

[Toril Toran]

Your analogy seems flawed.
Things are flung away from the vacuum due to the resistant fibres of a carpet, or the spinning action of the beater-bar.
According to the laws of motion (the second one I think) a body in motion tends to stay in motion unless acted upon by an outside force.
What force could pull something away from a black hole? Wouldn’t it have the largest gravity field due to it’s sheer size/mass?

 

[Will The Serious]

Things are flung away from the vacuum due to the resistant fibres of a carpet, or the spinning action of the beater-bar.

I have seen it happen on the top of a table saw, and hardwood and tile floors, no beater bar involved. Usually it is some dense particle like sand, but not always. I attribute this phenomenon to the normal force of gravity keeping the particle from lifting from the surface being vacuumed, or maybe the interference of other particles knocking into each other.

-Will

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

What force could pull something away from a black hole? Wouldn’t it have the largest gravity field due to it’s sheer size/mass?

Electromagnetism - it's why black holes have axial jets (which originate outside the event horizon) and why fridge magnets work. Electromagnetism is 10^36 times stronger than gravity.
Electromagnetism - the force we know best

I have seen it happen on the top of a table saw, and hardwood and tile floors, no beater bar involved. Usually it is some dense particle like sand, but not always. I attribute this phenomenon to the normal force of gravity keeping the particle from lifting from the surface being vacuumed, or maybe the interference of other particles knocking into each other.

Have you taken into account static electricity, van der Waals and similar EM-based forces as well as air turbulence?

 

[Will The Serious]

Have you taken into account static electricity, van der Waals and similar EM-based forces as well as air turbulence?

No, but I have now. I was just pointing out that there are examples of forces that seem highly directional that sometimes result in movement in unexpected directions away from the originating force.

These redirectings either are the result of complex interactions between masses or from unaccounted for forces, or possibly from an incomplete picture of how objects interact with the known forces. In the case of gravity, all of these cases may apply.

-Will

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Which example are you referring to? If the vacuuming example, it's likely to be turbulent air flow. For black holes, the axial jets are likely the result of electromagnetic forces - the magnetic field of the accretion disc being tightly twisted by the rotation of the black hole - although there is currently insufficient observational evidence to differentiate between the various theoretical models.

What powers a black hole's mighty jets? | Science | AAAS

 

[Will The Serious]

For a mental exercise: take the event horizon of a black hole, as an example of a place where odd or unexpected things could happen due to an incomplete understanding of the forces, the masses, and the complexity of the conditions.

If one gets close enough to a strong gravitational field, there may be a gradient of force across a falling body. That is, the closer end of an object may want to fall faster then the farther end of the object to the center of the gravitational force. (It is, in this case, easier for me to talk in terms of forces, rather than curvilinear space and time, for simplicity of communication and illustration). At some point, the difference in gravitational acceleration at the near end, may be so much greater than the acceleration experienced by the far end, that electromagnetic or atomic bonds aren't enough to overcome inertia and hold the object together.

Electromagnetism is 10^36 times stronger than gravity.

That's a lot of force.

Now, consider this being the case on an atomic level, (I'll avoid using terms like, quantum level, because I just don't understand the difference). So, an atom has structure most of us are familiar with; there's a nucleus consisting of a proton and/or proton-neutron pair, and orbiting electrons. Electrons don't orbit the way Planets orbit a star, but tend to be more random in their paths around their nucleus. They general stay within their valances (I took physics, not chemistry, so I'm not speaking with much authority). The orbiting electrons are trapped within their valance with several layers of regular distances from their nucleus. If these atomic particles can actually be pulled apart at or near the event horizon, some of the electrons may actually be traveling away from the center of the singularity when it's bonds are pulled apart. Maybe individual electrons, or other subatomic particles might have enough counter inertia to escape the event horizon. As these randomly moving particles are released from there bonds, a nuclear reaction would result and they may very well be propelled away from the black hole as most of their atomic partners are drawn in.

I don't know. I'm just imagining a scenario that makes sense to me.

-Will

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Perhaps you could watch the Great Courses on Wondrium that deal with astrophysics and physics? They do contain some mathematics, but nothing advanced, and it's all explained. There are also mathematics, chemistry, biochemistry, geology, biology and other similar courses available as well as numerous arts and humanities courses.

Wondrium

 

[Will The Serious]

I'm sure I would greatly enjoy the Great Courses. Time, however, doesn't bend in that way for me. It mostly curves towards tending my bees, growing my elderberry, pears, and apples, and foraging for more berries, dandelions, and other things to make jellies and jams, teas, syrups, and other stuff to sell at markets and fairs around New England.

-Will

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Yes, it can take many thousands of hours of work to make a significant impact in whatever you do. Even then, one may be barking up the wrong tree as I'm certain many scientists have done and possibly still are doing. However, surpassing their work also requires a similar expenditure of effort, if not greater. Speculation is fine and dandy, but there's nothing wrong with also acknowledging that you just don't know and don't have the time or resources to investigate.

You Can't Know Everything: How Admitting This Gives You Credibility (forbes.com)

 

[Will The Serious]

Speculation is fine and dandy, but there's nothing wrong with also acknowledging that you just don't know and don't have the time or resources to investigate.

Exactly. This thread is intended to just be a casual exploration of ideas with a little knowledge, supportable or not, mixed in. I am certainly not suggesting I am an expert or that I expect expert answers to my questions in this thread. However, I do hope to gain some insight through communal musings and logical arguments.

-Will

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

The trouble is do people have the time to spend considering other people's musing? The mods around here are not happy with people who treat this forum as a blogging site. It seems that it's fine to discuss articles from elsewhere on the web, but not to make threads that exclusively expound one's own personal theories.

 

[Will The Serious]

As you know, I write a little fan fiction on this site. A sub-forum titled, Science and Technology, seems the perfect place for exactly this type of thread. We explore concepts in astrophysics, time travel, cosmic genesis, current thinking and science around these big issues, talk about our own perceptions and thoughts, in order to illicit responses and improve our understanding and our contributions to the larger forum. If we didn't find these discussions entertaining, we wouldn't participate on a Trek BBS at all.

-Will

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

It has to be based on current thinking with references or the mods will shut it down. Just making stuff up off the top of one's head as though it has any validity just because one thought it is not permitted, apparently. Just saying... I'm not notifying the mods on anyone though. I think what really irks them is multiple consecutive posts (against the board rules) and ignoring other posters that want to debate one's theses. However, I don't think many posters have the patience to debate ideas that have no grounding in established science or technology. Most of us are too busy.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

The Unruh effect from quantum field theory predicts that an observer who is accelerating through spacetime will experience a thermal bath of particles (mostly photons for human-survivable accelerations), which have an effective temperature. An inertial observer in the same region of spacetime would measure no Unruh radiation. (For example, this would apply to someone falling into a black hole as they'd be in free fall. As far as they're concerned, they're not accelerating within their own reference frame, only as measured by an external, non-inertial observer.*) The effect is tiny - an acceleration of 1g = 9.81 m/s² corresponds to a temperature of 4×10^−20 K.

*See Equivalence principle - Wikipedia

Hawking radiation arises from the Unruh effect applied to non-inertial observers in the curved spacetime near massive objects. Close to a mass, an observer must accelerate to maintain their position relative to the mass. This observer measures a local thermal bath of photons due to Unruh radiation. Applying the condition of thermal equilibrium implies that this thermal bath has a finite temperature as observed from large distances where spacetime is flatter, which further implies there is outgoing radiation and the region therefore has an effective black-body temperature. The massive body loses energy and therefore mass (through E=mc²) due to this (Hawking) radiation.

Hawking radiation doesn't require a black hole event horizon. It will occur for any region of curved spacetime due to the presence of mass - it's just extreme curvature that makes it much more pronounced. However, even for black holes, it takes an extremely long time for them to evaporate - 10^67 years for a one solar mass black hole. For massive objects such as the Sun, the Earth and you and me, it might as well be infinite time - the masses involved occupy a region much larger than their respective Schwarzschild radii so spacetime is much less curved. Black hole evaporation can't begin until the effective temperature of the CMBR falls below that of the black hole as the energy of the photons falling into it would otherwise exceed the energy of the photons being emitted from the curved region of spacetime. A solar-mass black hole has an effective temperature of only 6x10^-8 K, whereas the CMBR's effective temperature is 2.7 K.

However, perhaps the above explanation is also too oversimplified and I agree that it is less easy to grasp than the incorrect one usually stated.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

If virtual particles appear and disappear by annihilating each other couldn’t you infer that they may have a short half- life?
Couldn’t another pair come into existence and annihilate both positive particles?

The expectation values of a virtual particle pair's lifespan and energy can be estimated by using one form of the uncertainty principle (ΔEΔt ≥ ħ/2 * rather than ΔpΔx ≥ ħ/2). However, virtual particles are merely pictorial representations of propagator terms that appear in the perturbation calculations of Quantum Field Theory. They are a convenient way of doing the math(s) and might have no more validity than the epicycles of the Ptolemaic or Copernican Solar System models. The virtual particles of quantum vacuum fluctuations are supposed to occur as particle-antiparticle pairs that annihilate each other very quickly (although that's just the first in an infinite series of Feynman diagram representations of interactions of increasing complexity).

* A quantum state that exists only for a time Δt cannot have an energy that is better defined than ΔE = ħ/2Δt.

 

[Will The Serious]

https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-discover-a-stunning-river-of-stars-flowing-through-space
"A stunning river of stars has been spotted flowing through the intergalactic space in a cluster of galaxies about 300 million light years away.

Such bridges are known as stellar streams; and, at a length of 1.7 million light-years, the newly named Giant Coma Stream is the longest we've ever seen. And that's not all: the faint river is the first of its kind ever seen outside of a galaxy."

1.7 million light years in length. For a comparison, our own Milky Way galaxy is only one-hundred-thousand light years across.

But, our closest galactic neighbor, Andromeda, is

2.5 million light years away.

In Star Trek terms, at warp 9, it would take the Enterprise, 2,331.96 years to travel the length of the Giant Coma Stream. At warp 10, it would take, 1700 years. That's a long river of stars (Not accounting for any time compression).

It would also take them about 411,522.63 years to even reach the Giant Coma Stream, at warp 9.

Could that identifiable organization of stars be equal in mass to a whole typical spiral galaxy? Did the spiral come undone?

The article talks about intragalactic rivers of stars within our own galaxy, and one can image, with the gravitational force involved, those rivers could become quite twisted with eddies and shoots, much like a real river. The difference would be in the bank erosion. There would have to be points where the river waters became so muddied with star-silt, as to become hard to distinguish the banks from the flow. I wonder in which direction, relative to the center of a galaxy, do these streams of stars usually travel? My thought is, away from, but it may not always be easy to tell in the short snapshot of time we have been here to observe.

-Will

 

[Santaman]

Hmm... kinda neat, you can go starhopping until you reach the next galaxy.

 

[publiusr]

A jet might be a handy thing:
https://www.livescience.com/space/b...-powerful-radiation-at-earth-every-76-minutes

Some have theorized the proposed Planet 9 is a small black hole.

I hope so…that might be used.

 

[Will The Serious]

Hmm... kinda neat, you can go starhopping until you reach the next galaxy.

It could make for an interesting setting for a sci-fi series. All those planetary systems flowing out through intergalactic space. No blackhole; there wouldn't be a galactic band of dense stars across the night ski, only an area of bright stars upstream and on the opposite side, downstream, amidst a nearly starless night dimly dotted with distant galaxies instead of stars. Of course there would still be the collection of stars around in the same part of the stream the observer was in, but those would be significantly less dense in presence then the stars before and behind the observer.

If the stream is lengthening, as it flows through space, the would be the blue-shift constellations and the red-shift constellations.

-Will