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Dark energy from supermassive black holes? Physicists spar over radical idea

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Re: Dark energy from supermassive black holes? Physicists spar over radical idea

#111
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's not every day that we extend models into a domain (near the singularity) where we know our model must eventually break down somehow Yes, but that doesn't change what the model says. It just affects how likely we think it is that the model is actually realized in our universe. I agree that it's quite likely that the standard black hole model I described isn't realized in our actual universe. But we can still us…

> But saying that it's a robust prediction if particular conditions are satisfied But that's not what they said. They said (or implied) it's a robust prediction of GR for our actual universe. > But we can still use it if we don't have any better model to replace it with, since even if it breaks down near the singularity, that still leaves the whole rest of the model with plenty of usefulness. But I never questioned t…

> They said (or implied) it's a robust prediction of GR for our actual universe.

Who is "they"? The people who published the singularity theorems didn't say that. They only said the theorems are mathematically valid given the assumptions, and they proved that by proving the theorems. They didn't say the assumptions had to be satisfied in our actual universe. In fact, most physicists say the opposite: that the mathematical validity of the singularity theorems shows that at least one of the assumptions they are based on must be violated in our actual universe, since it would be physically unreasonable for there to be singularities in our actual universe.

> I merely said we don't really know what's happening with the matter once it's inside the black hole / close to the singularity.

In the sense that most physicists believe a singularity is physically unreasonable, yes, I agree. But in the absence of a better model, that doesn't help very much. The nice thing about the hypothesis under discussion here is that it holds out the prospect of a better model, if it can be made to work.

Re: Dark energy from supermassive black holes? Physicists spar over radical idea

#112
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "squashed into spaghetti" occurs in "normal space" before you get to the black hole, for most black holes. It is not an effect of anything special about black holes, it's just plain ol' normal tidal effects, turned up to eleven, then turned up until the knob breaks, then turned up some more. Neutron stars will give you a bad day with tidal effects too long before you reach their surface. Very large black holes tu…

What? Any reading material on the last part?

I don't have a specific link. But the larger the black hole, the lesser the tidal forces at the event horizon. Tidal forces are created by gravity gradients, the differences, and the differences become less extreme as the black hole sizes up. You can see it just by thinking about how the gravity field changes around an object as it gets larger; think about where the 1G line as you make the Earth denser and denser, and note how quickly the field is changing at that point. Hypothetically, a large black hole would permit you to actually survive entry into the event horizon. It's still hypothetical because the environment around any such black hole in the current era is still far too violent for you to get that close, and it will be for cosmologically-meaningful periods of time.

Re: Dark energy from supermassive black holes? Physicists spar over radical idea

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always wondered if the "horizon" metaphor in event horizon was more apt than we expected - just like when you approach the earth's horizon, you don't get flattened or fall off, you just reveal more geography - I've always wondered if it were possible that as you approach an event horizon you don't get "squashed into spaghetti" but just reveal more space which is just as "normal" as the space before you approache…

The tricky part with black hole spaghettification is that the slope of the gravity gradient (tidal force) can be pictured as exceeding 90 degrees within the event horizon, because there is no speed limit for the flow of space. This doesn't violate physics because Einstein's speed of light limit only applies to matter moving within space. This idea has been embraced by astrophysicists to explain inflation at the start…

Something like this:

https://www.livescience.com/dark-energy-could-lead-to-a-seco...

If the ends of the spaghetti can never reach each other after space's rate of stretching passes the speed of light, then the spaghetti can never reach the pit. If the spaghetti never reaches the pit, then everything in the black hole falls forever. If everything falls forever, then the clock outside the block hole is synced to the clock of particles falling inside the black hole.

Which suggests that a black hole forms an infinitely deep funnel, and if we entertain the idea that the rules of our universe keep working inside it, an hourglass.

What does that look like? On Earth, space pours down our gravity well, reaching a stagnation point sometime before the center, which forms an indentation in spacetime which we ride in as we orbit the sun.

In a black hole, there's still a stagnation point, if we consider the entire life of the black hole, including final evaporation. The bottom of the indentation falls at the speed of light, but eventually slows and rebounds as the black hole begins to shrink due to Hawking radiation, then springs back into our reality. In other words, the space inside a black hole is more dynamic than where we are.

We're normally shown a picture of that falling floor tearing through our spacetime into an unknown place. But since the space is falling faster than the speed of light, I think that it crosses over itself and diverges, forming a white hole on the other side. The math of that white hole matches the math of the Big Bang. So we can picture the child universe as starting just like ours, and forming a sphere in the bottom of the hourglass expanding faster than the speed of light until its density gets low enough that the expansion proceeds at merely the speed of light. The same way that inflation worked in our universe.

Particles at the edge of the sphere are able to leak back into the parent universe via Hawking radiation just like our galaxies at great distance slip out of our universe red-shifted faster than the speed of light. So the mass of the sphere begins to shrink, which slows its rate of expansion. Eventually its space starts to contract, [turning the child Hubble constant negative] It's not that matter is crushed together, but that space is contracting so fast out from under it that it has nowhere else to go but back up out of the throat. The final pop is reverse spaghettification, as each particle is torn apart back to quarks, electrons and energy back into the parent universe. The hard part to visualize is that the crunch happens inward towards each particle simultaneously, there is no center.

The quantum mechanical aspect and notions like the Planck length are probably a distraction. An electron is always a point charge roughly the size of its uncertainty, in any spacial coordinate system. Maybe it has more mass and is a muon or tau (or something heavier), but it never stops being an electron fundamentally. When it spaghettifies in the throat, its wave function only has 2 degrees of freedom, along the radial axis and rotation, with the third degree along the time axis. Until space diverges again in the white hole on the other side and it's able to exist in 3D again.

So our universe is the white hole on the other side of the black hole in the parent universe, and the universe is infinite, looking like swiss cheese with child universes and more black holes inside the bubbles. The centers of atoms may act like miniature black holes, but with slightly different rules involving the electroweak force and probability, creating an emergent force which we think of as the strong force.

It's universes all the way down.

This is the best mental model of reality that I've stumbled upon, but I'm sure it's wrong in important ways.

Re: Dark energy from supermassive black holes? Physicists spar over radical idea

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tricky part with black hole spaghettification is that the slope of the gravity gradient (tidal force) can be pictured as exceeding 90 degrees within the event horizon, because there is no speed limit for the flow of space. This doesn't violate physics because Einstein's speed of light limit only applies to matter moving within space. This idea has been embraced by astrophysicists to explain inflation at the start…

Something like this: https://www.livescience.com/dark-energy-could-lead-to-a-seco... If the ends of the spaghetti can never reach each other after space's rate of stretching passes the speed of light, then the spaghetti can never reach the pit. If the spaghetti never reaches the pit, then everything in the black hole falls forever. If everything falls forever, then the clock outside the block hole is synced to the cl…

> I'm sure it's wrong in important ways

I'm afraid so. I'll just pick on two important ways found in one of your key sentences, and I'll stick to widely accepted results from Hawking, Unruh, Gibbons and Giddings.

> Particles at the edge of the sphere are able to leak back into the parent universe via Hawking radiation just like our galaxies at great distance slip out of our universe red-shifted faster than the speed of light.

Firstly, Hawking radiation doesn't leak anything out of the black hole itself; it's produced by interactions between the outside matter fields and the dynamical spacetime outside an evolving black hole. Secondly, you have the relevant part of cosmic horizons backwards. They also produce a form of Hawking radiation in the far future.

So, since nothing ever comes from inside the black hole's horizon even at final evaporation, or from outside the cosmic horizon, I don't see how you can recover your more cosmological ideas.

Now some technical detail:

The origin of Hawking radiation is well outside the horizon of the black hole. Quoting Unruh in https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.78.041504> (corresponding to the preprint at https://arxiv.org/abs/0804.1686>):

"One way of achieving a better understanding of [why black holes seem to behave by thermal objects and evaporate by emitting Hawking radiation] is to study the origin of particles in black hole evaporation, .i.e., the question of where they are created." [authors' emphasis]

The paper goes on to show that because Hawking radiation is a low-energy process, the origin of particles must be from a distance outside the horizon proportional to the radiation wavelength, and cannot originate very close to the horizon (much less from inside it). This follows from his earlier conference presentation https://inspirehep.net/literature/775859> (pdf available at https://pos.sissa.it/043/039/>), "Where are the particles created in Black Hole evaporation?"

Giddings makes the same point in https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037026931...> (open access, but easier to read as a preprint at https://arxiv.org/abs/1511.08221>). From the abstract:

"Where does Hawking radiation originate? A common picture is that it arises from excitations very near or at the horizon ... However, closer investigation of both the total emission rate and the stress tensor of Hawking radiation supports the statement that its source is a near-horizon quantum region, or "atmosphere," whose radial extent is set by the horizon radius scale".

The last clause there is expanded in the text:

"... the source of Hawking radiation is a quantum region of size \Delta r ~ R outside the black hole horizon"

R there means the Schwarzschild radius, so particles originate in a fairly voluminous region with the lower edge at about a Schwarzschild radius above the black hole's horizon, i.e., at about 2R.

On Hawking radiation from cosmic horizons, Gibbons and Hawking's 1977 paper 1https://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevD.15.27...> details the production there. You can get this paper from https://sci-hub.ru/https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.15.2738>.

"We have shown that the close connection between event horizons and thermodynamics has a wider validity than the ordinary black-hole situation in which it was first discovered. An observer in a cosmological model with a positive cosmological constant will have an event horizon whose area can be interpreted as the entropy or lack of information that the observer has about the regions of the universe that he cannot se. When the solution has settled down to a stationary state, the event horizon will have associated with it a surface gravity K which plays a role similar to the temperature in the classical first law of event horizons ... this similarity is more than an analogy: The observer will detect an isotropic background of therman radiation ... coming, apparently, from the event horizon".

The 21st century updates from Unruh and Giddings applies to this 1977 paper by Gibbons and Hawking: "from the event horizon" -> "from a region closer to the observer than the horizon".

The above assumes General Relativity is a good physical model at the length scales in question. If you don't assume that, then you might be able to ignore the results above if black holes and expanding space are substantially different from their standard descriptions in General Relativity. How different? Would the recent data from the Event Horizon Telescope still be produced? Would the waveforms from binary black hole and black hole-neutron star mergers found by LIGO and Virgo still be produced? Would the cosmic microwave background have the same temperature and power spectrum?

Re: Dark energy from supermassive black holes? Physicists spar over radical idea

#115
post #59
post #53

Could it be that there is no gravity, and what we perceive as gravity is the pressure from the expanding universe?

So how would that explain the fact that spacetime is curved in a very predictable manner in a clear relation to the mass of an object in spacetime ?

Perhaps spacetime curvature is nothing more than the gradual stopping of the universe expanding when mass is present.

Re: Dark energy from supermassive black holes? Physicists spar over radical idea

#116
post #53

Could it be that there is no gravity, and what we perceive as gravity is the pressure from the expanding universe?

Isn't that gravity is just a result of clock tick rate is slower if you are closer to some matter?

I believe that is backwards...time changes due to gravity and not vice versa. It's a misunderstanding propagated in the last few years through misconceptions.
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