Sinister Security

Read

Parallel Universes Could Solve One of the Biggest Mysteries in Physics

Read

Image result for Parallel Universes Could Solve One of the Biggest Mysteries in Physics

BLACK HOLES AND REVELATIONS

Black holes are the source of a major quandary when it comes to our understanding of physics; either they can destroy information, which contradicts what we know about quantum mechanics, or they seemingly disregard Einstein’s theory of relativity. However, it’s now thought by some that the many worlds interpretation might help explain the situation.

Black holes have long since presented something of a contradiction considering our current understanding of physics. Now, the many worlds interpretation offers a convincing explanation.

It suggests that each one of the multiple possible outcomes of a quantum event splinters off into its own discrete world.

Now, a team of researchers at the California Institute of Technology led by Sean Carroll has suggested that this interpretation can explain away inconsistencies pertaining to black holes. They say that general relativity is upheld within each single possible world, while information is preserved across the entire global wave function, if not among individual branches.

MANY WORLDS

Aidan Chatwin-Davies, a member of Carroll’s team, told Futurism that other scientists have already suggested applying the many worlds theory, also known as Everettian, to the black hole information problem. “Cosmetically, we’re perhaps the first to cleanly label our perspective as Everettian,” he said. “More substantively, we wanted to perform some concrete calculations to mathematize otherwise abstract ideas.”

“Previous attempts considered statements of general relativity and quantum mechanics to be applicable to the same world,” Yasunori Nomura, professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley told Futurism. “My approach separates the two – quantum mechanics allows for a quantum state to be a ‘superposition’ of many classical worlds; statements of quantum mechanics apply to the entirety of these many worlds while those of general relativity apply only to each of these worlds.”

This line of thinking is important because it could potentially explain more about the nature of gravity and spacetime. Nomura suggests that these ideas have a broader relevance to how quantum gravity works at a fundamental level, particular in relation to the origins of the universe.

“We know that we need both general relativity and quantum mechanics to understand black holes, and so they are a good starting point for testing out ideas about quantum gravity,” explained Chatwin-Davies. “If we really understood how to describe black holes, then we would be a great deal closer to being able to describe quantum gravity in broad generality.”

By using the many worlds interpretation, scientists and astronomers are finding new ways to approach longstanding questions about black holes. With further study, this research might offer up further information about the very fabric of our universe that could fill in some persistent gaps in our knowledge.

References: New Scientist

Article was originally published on Fututrism.

Physicists Say They've Found A Way To Detect Naked Singularities

Read

Gyrosco peprecession LucasVB/WikimediaCommons

Black holes are weird: insanely dense objects that are crammed into such a small space they cause space-time to distort and the laws of physics to break down into a singularity.

Fortunately, the Universe shields us from this weirdness by wrapping black holes in event horizons. But now, physicists say they've found a way we could detect something even more extreme - a naked singularity - and most likely bend the laws of physics in the process.

"A naked singularity, if such a thing exists, would be an abrupt hole in the fabric of reality - one that would not just distort space-time, but would also wreak havoc on the laws of physics wherever it goes and lead to a catastrophic loss of predictability," explains Avaneesh Pandey for IB Times.

If that sounds a little too confronting, don't worry, this whole study is purely theoretical, and is hinged on one very big assumption - that naked singularities actually exist in our Universe, something that scientists haven ever confirmed.

But according to Einstein's theory of general relativity at least, and our best computer models to date, naked singularities are possible.

So, what are they? A singularity can form when huge stars collapse at the end of their lives into regions so small and dense, physics as we know it fails to explain what could happen there.

There are two general laws of physics that govern our understanding of reality: quantum mechanics, which explains all the small stuff, such as the behaviour of subatomic particles; and general relativity, which describes the stuff we can see, such as stars and galaxies.

When applied to singularities, both these schools of thought predict different and incompatible outcomes.

And we've never really had to deal with that conundrum, because all the singularities we know of are inside black holes, wrapped in an event horizon from which not even light can escape - or at the very birth of our Universe, shrouded by radiation we can't see past. Out of sight, out of mind, right?

But naked singularities are theoretical singularities that are exposed to the rest of the Universe for some reason.

Below you can see an illustration of a black hole wrapped in its event horizon (dotted line) on the left, and a naked singularity on the right. The arrows indicate light, which would be able to escape a naked singularity, but not a black hole.

Sudip Bhattacharyya/Pankaj Joshi

Assuming they do exist, the big question then is how would we be able to distinguish a naked singularity from a regular black hole, and this is where the new study comes in.

Researchers from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in India have come up with a two-step plan based on the fact that singularities, as far as we know, are rotating objects, just like black holes.

According to Einstein's theory of general relativity, the fabric of space-time in the vicinity of any rotating objects gets 'twisted' due to this rotation. And this effect causes a gyroscopic spin and makes the orbits of particles around the rotating objects 'precess', or change their rotational axis.

You can watch the hypnotic precession of a gyroscope below to see what we mean - its axis is no longer straight:

Based on this, the researchers say that we could figure out the nature of a rotating objects by measuring the rate at which a gyroscope precesses - its precession frequency - at two fixed points close to the object.

According to the new paper, there are two possibilities:

The precession frequency of the gyroscope changes wildly between the two points, which suggests the rotating object in question is a regular black hole.

The precession frequency changes in a regular, well-behaved manner, indicating a naked singularity. Obviously getting a gyroscope close enough to a black hole to perform these experiments isn't exactly easy.

But that's okay, because the team has also come up with a way to observe the same effect from here on Earth - measuring the precession frequencies of matter falling into either black holes or naked singularities using X-ray wavelengths.

"This is because the orbital plane precession frequency increases as the matter approaches a rotating black hole, but this frequency can decrease and even become zero for a rotating naked singularity," the team's press release explains.

Again, we have to make it clear that all of this is wildly speculative at this time - we have never found any candidate naked singularities, and we're only just beginning to truly understand regular black holes.

It's also worth noting that last week, another team of researchers suggested that even if naked singluarities exist, strange quantum effects could keep them hidden from us.

So there's definitely no consensus right now on whether we'll ever get the chance to study naked singularities.

And that's not a terrible thing for now, because are we really ready to observe what goes on at the edge of our Universe?

Maybe, in our lifetime, we'll find out.

The research has been published in Physical Review D.

Scientists Just Completed The Last Missing Piece Of Einstein's Theory Of Relativity

Read

Time Is NOT Real: Physicists Show EVERYTHING Happens At The Same Time

Read

TIME is not real – it is a human construct to help us differentiate between now and our perception of the past, an equally astonishing and baffling theory states.

The concept of time is simply an illusion made up of human memories, everything that has ever been and ever will be is happening RIGHT NOW.

That is the theory according to a group of esteemed physicists who aim to solve one of the universe’s mysteries.

Most people do not even consider the concept of time but there is nothing in the laws of physics to state that it should move in the forward direction that we know.

The laws of physics are symmetric ultimately meaning that time could have easily moved in a backward direction as it does forward.

Time is a human concept

Indeed some adherents to the ‘big crunch’ theory say time WILL run backwards when the universe stops expanding and starts contracting back in on itself.

This conundrum as to why we interpret time in a forward motion has led scientists to question why.

Inevitably, some have concluded that time is simply human construct.

Past, present and future are all 'now'.

They argue that there is a ‘block-universe’ where time and space are connected, otherwise known as spacetime.

The theory, which is backed up Einstein’s theory of relativity, states that space and time are part of a four dimensional structure where everything thing that has happened has its own co-ordinates in spacetime.

This would allow everything to be ‘real’ in the sense that the past, and even the future, are still there in spacetime – making everything equally important as the present.

Time is formed by memories, according to physicists / GETTY Images

Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist Max Tegmark, told space.com: "We can portray our reality as either a three-dimensional place where stuff happens over time, or as a four-dimensional place where nothing happens [‘block universe’] — and if it really is the second picture, then change really is an illusion, because there's nothing that's changing; it's all just there — past, present, future.

“We have the illusion, at any given moment, that the past already happened and the future doesn't yet exist, and that things are changing.
But all I'm ever aware of is my brain state right now. The only reason I feel like I have a past is that my brain contains memories.”

Julian Barbour, a British physicist who has authored several books on the subject of time, describes everything as a series of “nows”.

Dr Barbour told physicist and author Adam Frank in the book ‘About Time: Cosmology and Culture at the Twilight of the Big Bang’: "As we live, we seem to move through a succession of Nows, and the question is, what are they?” He explains, adding to the spacetime theory where everything has its own place: "You can think of it as a landscape or country. Each point in this country is a Now and I call the country Platonia, because it is timeless and created by perfect mathematical rules."

He adds that what we perceive as the past is simply an illusion formed in our brain.

Dr Barbour: "The only evidence you have of last week is your memory. But memory comes from a stable structure of neurons in your brain now. The only evidence we have of the Earth's past is rocks and fossils. But these are just stable structures in the form of an arrangement of minerals we examine in the present. The point is, all we have are these records and you only have them in this Now."

A Mystery of Einstein's Relativity Has Been Resolved And It Broke Physics

Read

They're called "laws" for a reason. You aren't supposed to break the rules that make the universe work. So when researchers from the University of Glasglow found what appeared to be a basic contradiction in Einstein's (and Galileo's) physics, they got worried. And then they got to work fixing it.

So what's this rule that got broken? A pretty important one, as it turns out. Here's what was happening. The paper by Matthias Sonnleitner, Nils Trautmann, and Stephen M. Barnett described how they'd observed that when atoms in motion emitted small bursts of light, they sometimes generated a new, friction-esque force. When identical (but stationary) atoms were induced to spit out light beams, there was no corresponding force. It might not seem like a big deal, but physics relies on the basic assumption that the rules of the universe are consistent — they're not supposed to change just because you're moving.

To get to the bottom of the mystery, the same team first set out to identify where the extra energy was coming from. And this is where it really started blowing our minds. The secret is that the photons that go flying off these atoms act both as particles and as waves, and as waves, they are subject to the Doppler effect. In this case, what the researchers found was that the energy of the photons spat out in a forward-moving direction would be higher than the energy of a photon shot out the atom's backend. Now that all makes sense — but it still leaves the universe with some excess energy that didn't seem to come from anywhere.

The problem might have been wrapped up in the energy-mass confusion of general relativity, but the researchers found their solution by going back to a standard equation in classical physics: p = mv. Momentum (p) is equal to mass (m) times velocity (v). Now, the way that you run this calculation almost always involves keeping the mass static while the velocity changes, since for the most part the mass isn't going to change enough to have a meaningful effect. But in the case of these tiny atoms, allowing for the mass to change accounted for the excess energy.

In other words, what the researchers found was another way to arrive at the conclusion that mass and energy are interchangeable. What they found had the side effect of proving the theory of relativity instead of threatening it. And we can all breathe a sigh of relief that physics really does work.

Via Curiosity

A Five-Dimensional Black Hole Could 'Break' General Relativity, Say Physicists

Read

For the first time ever, physicists have magnificently simulated what would occur to black holes in a five-dimensional world, and the way they act could threaten our essential understanding of how the Universe works. According to this simulation, if our Universe is made up of five or even more dimensions - something that researchers have struggled to approve or negate - Einstein's general theory of relativity, the base of modern physics, would be incorrect. In other words, five-dimensional black holes would comprise gravity so powerful, the laws of physics as we know them would eventually fall apart.

In a five-dimensional universe, physicists have theorized that black holes are more like very tinny rings instead of just holes, and as they grow, they can contribute increase to a sequence of 'bulges' that become thinner and thinner with time, and ultimately break off to make mini black holes elsewhere.

These ring-shaped black holes (also known as 'black rings') were initially suggested in 2002, but until now, no one’s been able to effectively simulate their growth.

This has been made conceivable thanks to the COSMOS supercomputer at the University of Cambridge in the UK - the biggest shared-memory computer in Europe that can achieve 38.6 trillion calculations per second.

The difficultly with five-dimensional black holes is that they’re believed to comprise of 'ultragravity rings', where gravity is so powerful, it gives upsurge to a state called Naked Singularity. Naked singularity is an occurrence so extraordinary, no one actually knows what would happen inside it, excluding that the laws of general relativity simply would no longer apply.

Theoretical physicist Markus Kunesch from the University of Cambridge, says, "As long as singularities stay hidden behind an event horizon, they do not cause trouble and general relativity holds - the 'cosmic censorship conjecture' says that this is always the case. As long as the cosmic censorship conjecture is valid, we can safely predict the future outside of black holes."

But what if singularity could occur just outside a black hole's event horizon? Physicists have theorized that in five or more dimensions, if an object that has shrunken to an infinite density – called singularity - is not restricted by an event horizon, it turn into naked singularity, and things would get so cracked in and around that object, we'd need to totally rethink our understanding of how physics works.

Kunesch and his group scientists say they've just about reached the limits of what their supercomputer can simulate, but would like to work out what it is about four-dimensional universes that create naked singularity impossible, and general relativity right. Tunyasu vunakool says, "If cosmic censorship doesn't hold in higher dimensions, then maybe we need to look at what's so special about a four-dimensional universe that means it does hold,"

The research has been issued in Physical Review Letters, and here you can learn about 11 dimensional universe explained by Michio Kaku.