Lifeboat Foundation

According to Einstein’s theory of general relativity (GR), black holes are ferocious beasts able to swallow and destroy everything within their reach. Their strong gravitational pull deforms the space-time causal structure in such a way that nothing can get out of them once their event horizon is crossed. The fate of those incautious observers curious enough to cross this border is to suffer a painful spaghettification process due to the strong tidal forces before being destroyed at the center of the black hole.

For those who missed my 2014 review of E.O. Wilson’s book, “The Meaning of Human Existence.”

With a title as audacious as “The Meaning of Human Existence,” even a casual reader couldn’t be faulted for expecting a veritable Rosetta Stone to the cosmos and life as we know it. But in his latest book, Edward O. Wilson offers no philosophically-satisfying answers to this age-old “existence” question. And maybe that’s his point.

After all, the ability to ponder our own existence is at once a blessing and a curse. Neither sharks nor swallows seem to worry about too much more than their next meal. Yet in fifteen chapters, Wilson — a renowned biologist, naturalist, author and Harvard University professor emeritus, strips humanity of its soul.

Continue reading “E.O. Wilson Chases The ‘Great Riddle’ Of Human Existence” »

The opportunity for intellectual freedom is what drew Anna Ijjas to the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science. As an associate research scholar, Ijjas studies basic questions about the universe’s origin and future. “PCTS provided an environment that encouraged me to question established paradigms and pursue unexplored possibilities,” said Ijjas, who is Princeton’s John A. Wheeler Postdoctoral Fellow in cosmology and astroparticle physics. “Independence and creativity are real values at the center.”

Those values were on display at a conference in May to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the center, which trains early-career researchers and provides a place where theoretical scientists — defined as those who use mathematics to study the natural world — can tackle the biggest questions in science, from the search for dark matter to global climate simulations to theories of quantum gravity.

“The range of topics presented at the PCTS@ten conference demonstrates that we’ve reached the goal we set 10 years ago, which is to develop a new breed of theorists with a much broader view of science than they would normally get from typical postdoctoral training,” said Paul Steinhardt, Princeton’s Albert Einstein Professor in Science and the center’s director since 2007.

Continue reading “A decade of deep thinking: Princeton Center for Theoretical Science celebrates 10 years” »

A black hole may carry “soft hair,” low-energy quantum excitations that release information when the black hole evaporates.

Four decades ago, Stephen Hawking proposed that black holes could destroy information—a conclusion that is incompatible with standard laws of quantum physics. This idea started a controversy known as the “black hole information problem” that even now has not been resolved. A new study by Hawking himself and Malcom Perry, both at the University of Cambridge, and by Andrew Strominger at Harvard University shows that some of the assumptions that led to the information problem might be wrong [1]. Their results do not completely solve the problem, but point to a promising research direction that might lead to its long-awaited solution.

According to Einstein’s general theory of relativity, stationary black holes are completely determined by just three observable parameters: their mass, charge, and angular momentum. Almost none of the information about what fell into the black hole is visible from the outside. Physicist John Wheeler described this idea by saying that “black holes have no hair.”

New calculations by Dr. Hawking and other researchers suggest that essential properties of whatever falls into these cosmic pits may survive.

In the new, free-for-all era of dark matter research, the controversial idea that dark matter is concentrated in thin disks is being rescued from scientific oblivion.

Black Holes Holographic theory continues.

The hardest phenomena in the cosmos to understand may be nothing much at all.

This is one of those “therotical” topics that many of us have had at some point in our lives with our engineering team pals, or with our research department/ lab buddies. Fun to see Elon Musk share his views on this topic. Who knows; maybe? Last week, we learned that black holes may be nothing more that a multi-layer hologram in space.

“There’s a billion to one chance we’re living in base reality,” Elon Musk said tonight on stage at Recode’s Code Conference, meaning that one of the most influential and powerful figures in tech thinks that it’s overwhelmingly likely we’re just characters living inside a simulation.

The Verge co-founder Josh Topolsky got half-way through asking Musk if he thought our existence was simulated before the Tesla CEO jumped in to finish his question for him. “I’ve had so many simulation discussions it’s crazy,” Musk explained. “You’ve thought about this?” Topolsky asked. “A lot,” Musk replied. “It got to the point where every conversation was the AI / simulation conversation, and my brother and I agreed that we would ban such conversations if we were ever in a hot tub.”

Continue reading “Odds are we’re living in a simulation, says Elon Musk” »

A team of theoretical physicists used Loop Quantum Gravity, string theory’s biggest contender, and showed that the calculations are consistent with the idea that black holes have no insides, but that objects are stuck on their surface.

There’s a lot in our universe we don’t completely understand, such as dark matter and dark energy. Indeed, in the bizarre world of quantum physics, ideas are constantly shifting and changing regarding the true nature of the (somewhat mysterious) forces that govern our universe.

This is what’s happening now in the debate over what black holes really are.

Continue reading “New Evidence That Black Holes May Actually Be 2D Holograms” »