Hawking is on a Roll - Black Holes to Power the Earth! (And a Nobel~!)

[mungkiman]

 

Does anyone have the actual paper related to the gravitational wave measurements? I'd like to learn more about their sensor configuration and all that.....the super nitty details, not the high level stuff.

Back to Hawking - I have always found a stark contrast between Hawking and Einstein....in that Hawking is very much sensationalized and focuses on the fanciful. Einstein seemed way more grounded in reality. Perhaps that's the way Hawking is portrayed by the media, but I simply don't consider the two anywhere close to being in the same category. Has Hawking presented us with anything practical? I honestly don't know (that wasn't a rhetorical question). A quick glance through Wikipedia makes it sounds like all of his ideas have been contradicted by others? And lots of debates and challenges about things?

Btw, don't forget that Einstein introduced us to the idea of "space-time" - which is to say the dimensions and time are one and the same (or intrinsically related). I've been meaning to sit down and run the special relativity mathematics to see what idea we can derive about how "fast" things were moving during a "Big Bang" or "Creation Event". The thing that surprises me is how similar the two mechanisms would manifest themselves. Why couldn't they be the same thing? I want to see what the different relativistic observation points would observe in terms of time elapsed. Perhaps someone has already conducted that analysis?

What is practical about relativity? Einstein was very playful, and Hawking can't even speak. It's hard to imagine how 'fanciful' and 'sensational' are being applied here. I realize those at subjective, but I've never heard anyone inside or outside of science use those words for Hawking.

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Why the quote, then?

[Jim Naseum]

Hint: Where do the suppose their dead relations go? Why do some of them meditate? Who is it that many of them are confessing to? From whence come the ideas of nihilism? Pantheism? The Trinity? Manifest Destiny?

Metaphysics, not physics. Irrelevant to this thread and would simply result in a lock anyway.

Dave

Where have you been? Metaphysics has been part of this thread for days. Metaphysics is an essential part of cosmology. I can only assume you hadn't been reading along.

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[BigStewMan]

Yes, I exercise caution on a daily basis.  I don't speed very much anymore, and I stopped flipping people off a long time ago.  Either of those two things can get you killed.

Or if you live out here where i live, bumping into someone’s car is enough.  The other night, a 78 year old man, stumbled and touched a young guy’s car.  The young guy started beating him with an aluminum baseball bat. gas station security camera caught some of it on film.  

maybe if he thought it was all a dream, he wouldn’t be in the hospital right now.

I hate so much about this place.  

Edited February 13, 2016 by BigStewMan

[Mallette]

I can only assume you hadn't been reading along.

 

Get real.  You know better than that.  Old ploy...

 

Anyway, metaphysics is not mentioned in the TOS.  Religion is.  All religion is metaphysical in nature at this point in our crude science, but all metaphysics is not religion.

 

Dave

[Jim Naseum]

I can only assume you hadn't been reading along.

Get real. You know better than that. Old ploy...

Anyway, metaphysics is not mentioned in the TOS. Religion is. All religion is metaphysical in nature at this point in our crude science, but all metaphysics is not religion.

Dave

Nonsense.

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[DrWho]

 

Does anyone have the actual paper related to the gravitational wave measurements? I'd like to learn more about their sensor configuration and all that.....the super nitty details, not the high level stuff.

Back to Hawking - I have always found a stark contrast between Hawking and Einstein....in that Hawking is very much sensationalized and focuses on the fanciful. Einstein seemed way more grounded in reality. Perhaps that's the way Hawking is portrayed by the media, but I simply don't consider the two anywhere close to being in the same category. Has Hawking presented us with anything practical? I honestly don't know (that wasn't a rhetorical question). A quick glance through Wikipedia makes it sounds like all of his ideas have been contradicted by others? And lots of debates and challenges about things?

Btw, don't forget that Einstein introduced us to the idea of "space-time" - which is to say the dimensions and time are one and the same (or intrinsically related). I've been meaning to sit down and run the special relativity mathematics to see what idea we can derive about how "fast" things were moving during a "Big Bang" or "Creation Event". The thing that surprises me is how similar the two mechanisms would manifest themselves. Why couldn't they be the same thing? I want to see what the different relativistic observation points would observe in terms of time elapsed. Perhaps someone has already conducted that analysis?

What is practical about relativity? Einstein was very playful, and Hawking can't even speak. It's hard to imagine how 'fanciful' and 'sensational' are being applied here. I realize those at subjective, but I've never heard anyone inside or outside of science use those words for Hawking.

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Rather than discuss semantics, I could summarize the above with a question:

Where are the equations Hawking has presented? What are the testable ideas? Literal question btw.

 

 

Here is an excerpt from Hawking demonstrating some further insight into my criticism:

"If a black hole was in contact with thermal radiation, it would absorb some of the radiation, but it would not give off any radiation, since by definition, a black hole was a region from which nothing could escape. If the thermal radiation was at a lower temperature than the black hole, the loss of entropy down the black hole, would be greater than the increase of horizon area. 

This would be a violation of the generalized Second Law, that Bekenstein proposed. With hind sight, this should have suggested that black holes radiate. But no one, including Bekenstein and myself, thought anything could get out of a non rotating black hole."

 

This is a subtle thing, but note how he started with the assumption that "nothing could escape a black hole". He spent years intellectually masturbating through all sorts of theory because he started with an assumption. Assumptions themselves aren't a bad thing - and in fact often lead to much better intuition since it becomes easier to understand one sliver of a system. However, my criticism is how confidently he speaks on conclusions that are derived on assumptions based on non-existent observational data. Heck, Hawking himself claims that he prefers abstract thinking over observational analysis. I am very skeptical of guys with that kind of approach because I know how a logical conclusion can be entirely false because it was based on false assumptions. Some say that this is just the scientific process at play, but I think there is something more subtle and more fundamental here.

 

Would you base your fundamental understanding of the Universe on such an approach?

 

Holistically speaking, I disagree with a lot of Hawking's philosophical claims, and I get extremely skeptical when he openly takes pride in circular reasoning. I've never had a problem with the holistic philosophical perspectives of all the historical greats in science. Of course, I also disagree with a lot of your philosophical claims too Makes discussion interesting though. Btw, I personally use love as my metric of trust. When two people smarter than me disagree on a topic, I usually side with the person that demonstrates a more loving demeanor, or really the conclusions that result in a more loving world (the two usually coincide). Hawking doesn't meet that criteria - not even close.

[DrWho]

Btw, the majority of the scientific community doesn't even agree on the idea of black holes / singularities in the first place. We really know very little about the black dots we see in the sky. I mean, really consider what exactly it is we're observing.

 

I am also reminded of all the wild conclusions that were drawn as a result of some speck on the Hubble telescope.

 

Again, not discrediting the application of logic - just an honest observation about what is actually understood. All of the science surrounding string theory, singularities, etc.... needs to be held with an open palm because it's a highly volatile field right now. Lots of crazy math, but very little observation.

 

That to me is what defines "fanciful".....especially when the proponents are so sure about the "truth" of which they speak.

[Mallette]

Nonsense.

 

Fine.  Operate on your own definitions and get your topics locked. 

 

Dave

[Mallette]

Btw, the majority of the scientific community doesn't even agree on the idea of black holes / singularities in the first place

 

A bit more agreement now that gravitational waves have been detected that confirm Einstein and support Hawking.

 

Dave

[DrWho]

 

Btw, the majority of the scientific community doesn't even agree on the idea of black holes / singularities in the first place

 

A bit more agreement now that gravitational waves have been detected that confirm Einstein and support Hawking.

 

Well what we really have are two plates in America that moved with the same chirp frequency......and then a lot of mental jockeying to convince ourselves that it was triggered by the orbiting / crashing black hole scenario.

 

Have two sites record the same event limits the source of the event to an infinite plane. I'm not sure we're able to observe that much space simultaneously.

 

We definitely want to hype it up though so we can get some more funding to create better analyzers. That 3 point system they want to put into the gravitational null between the Earth and Sun is a natural next step. Having three points limits that future event to a line, which again makes it hard to analyze what was the original source.

 

Btw, I have a hard time believing such massive objects could be rotating around each other so quickly. That's why I'm looking for some more details - maybe they frequency scaled it to make it more relate-able to the public.

[Ski Bum]

Have two sites record the same event limits the source of the event to an infinite plane.

 

I don't think that's the case.  The detector would display the interference pattern (indicating the passage of a gravitational wave) for oblique hits too, any perturbation of space-time enough to result in an interference pattern.  The detectors are non-directional, at least at this primordial phase of this new method of observing the cosmos.  The fact that the detected blips were separated by the exact time as the light distance between the detectors also supports that it was not some local seismic event, but something propagating at the speed of light.

 

Anyone catch Charlie Rose last night?  Interesting discussion on the confirmation of gravitational waves, including the fact that these gravitational waves occur at audible frequencies, allowing the scientists to convert the interference patterns from the detector into audible sounds.  Seems that there are a whole lot of different predictable "sounds" from the various celestial objects and events that the detector should easily be able to confirm, so stay tuned!  It may even be possible to detect the long decayed echo of the Big Bang, although it would be so faint that we'll need much bigger ears to even get close.  This is a completely novel way for us to explore the universe, folks, literally listening to gravitational waves.  This is big, as much as Galileo pointing his telescope skywards.  Just too cool for words.  

Edited February 13, 2016 by Ski Bum

[Don Richard]

Metaphysics is an essential part of cosmology.

 

An essential part of philosophical cosmology, not of physical cosmology.

[Don Richard]

Where are the equations Hawking has presented? What are the testable ideas?

 

Check this out:

 

http://www.physicsoftheuniverse.com/scientists_hawking.html

 

And this:

 

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1305.7190.pdf

Edited February 13, 2016 by Don Richard

[DrWho]

I'm familiar with the first link. Nothing of meat there.

 

That second link is a good example of what I'm looking for. I don't know how any of his philosophical conclusions are derived by the "conclusions" of that paper:

 

"We extend the holographic formulation of the semiclassical no-boundary wave function (NBWF)

to models with Maxwell vector elds. It is shown that the familiar saddle points of the NBWF

have a representation in which a regular, Euclidean asymptotic AdS geometry smoothly joins onto

a Lorentzian asymptotically de Sitter universe through a complex transition region. The tree level

probabilities of Lorentzian histories are fully specied by the action of the AdS region of the saddle

points. The scalar and vector matter proles in this region are complex from an AdS viewpoint,

with universal asymptotic phases. The dual description of the semiclassical NBWF thus involves

complex deformations of Euclidean CFTs."

 

Remove the fancy words and what do we have here? Two different "functions" smoothly align under certain conditions. That's like saying y=x has the same slope as y=x^2 when x = 1. Certainly way more involved of a calculation, and really cool stuff.....but let's keep this in perspective. He's describing the shape of functions. That's a lot different than describing the shape of observations....

 

How does this put him on the same page as Einstein or Newton? Am I missing a nuance here?

[DrWho]

I don't think that's the case.  The detector would display the interference pattern (indicating the passage of a gravitational wave) for oblique hits too, any perturbation of space-time enough to result in an interference pattern.  The detectors are non-directional, at least at this primordial phase of this new method of observing the cosmos.  The fact that the detected blips were separated by the exact time as the light distance between the detectors also supports that it was not some local seismic event, but something propagating at the speed of light.

 

 

I'm not implying a local seismic event here....

 

I'm saying any event measured at two points in space with a specific time difference results in a solution set that constitutes an entire plane. That plane could be one-dimensional I suppose (a line), but this is just straight up linear algebra.

[Don Richard]

How does this put him on the same page as Einstein or Newton? Am I missing a nuance here?

 

It shows some of his work in applying mathematics to solve some of the problems that himself and other theoretical physicists were having using conventional techniques. Think in terms of baby steps, not revelation knowledge, in answering the questions Hawking was asking himself.

Edited February 13, 2016 by Don Richard

[DrWho]

 

How does this put him on the same page as Einstein or Newton? Am I missing a nuance here?

 

It shows some of his work in applying mathematics to solve some of the problems that himself and other theoretical physicists were having using conventional techniques.

 

Absolutely agreed on that front....the dude is a math genius.

 

I just think there is a difference between "solving the math" and "offering new insight". Demonstrating new insight requires solving the math, but solving the math does not necessitate a new insight.

[Don Richard]

So much of what these advanced physicists do requires collaboration. In a biography of his I read that many discoveries occurred in the break room at Cambridge with other professors. He's just doing his part.

Edited February 13, 2016 by Don Richard

[JJkizak]

I thought he mathematically proved that singularities exist and that later on they do emit energy. And the 2D Quantum mathematics analysis suggested that the Universe is a 3D holographic projection of matter.

JJK

[Don Richard]

I thought he mathematically proved that singularities exist and that later on they do emit energy. And the 2D Quantum mathematics analysis suggested that the Universe is a 3D holographic projection of matter.

JJK

 

Make that a 10D projection according to M theory.