A surprising story that actually made the news, including in an MSNBC news column called "Cosmic Log" on March 27/08 concerned certain legal action being taken against the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). That one of the proponents of the law suit is a former nuclear safety officer by the name of Walter Wagner leaves one to wonder how any hiring process could ever allow a space cadet like Wagner to slip between the cracks. One would assume that a certain degree of knowledge pertaining to the fields of astro physics and nuclear physics be a mandatory requirement for such a sensitive position.
Wagner and co- fear mongerer Luis Sancho filed the lawsuit in Hawaii's U.S. District Court - never mind that this is CERN's baby, just because a few American scientists are involved in the program. Apparently these two pinheads believe that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) which is scheduled to be powered up this summer could conceivably create a mini black hole that could swallow the world and everything in proximity to it right up and only burp it back in streams of energy particles and X-rays.
Everything which the scientific community professes to know about the origins of black holes can be summed up by saying that they are what happens when a neutron star collapses in on itself, creating an intense gravity well known as a singularity such that the outermost electrons are literally stripped from the nuclei of incoming particles once they pass what is called an event horizon and therefore light cannot be emitted from a black hole. The operative words here of course are "collapsing neutron star".
Our very own sun at its centre is undergoing such enormously energetic reactions under such intense internal gravitic stress as to be simply unimaginable. It takes about 10 million years for light that originates at the center of our sun to reach its surface, such is the effect of its gravity on time and EM wave propagation. And yet the sun will probably never turn into a black hole.
Notwithstanding that we can exceed the temperatures which we presume to exist at the sun's core in the lab and indeed have done so, there is absolutely no reason to believe that it is possible to create a sustainable black hole that could swallow up our world with only the masses of nuclear particles to work with in the Large Hadron Collider. Wagner and Sancho are inadvertently portraying themselves as attention-seeking sensationalists and to take them seriously simply isn't an option. I wouldn't sit in their camp for an instant and only because I will not be a candidate for self-ridicule.
How preposterous. Just for the sake of argument - and believe me, this scenario would not ever be realized - if the LHC were to 'accidentally' create a black hole which was beginning to swallow up particles (ridiculous) then the solution would simply be to turn the damn thing off. Wagner is alluding to a physics which simply doesn't exist. His high camp theorizing of strangelets and magnetic monopoles remind me of that old saw, "Those that can, do. Those that can't, teach."
This is not the first doomsday warning against the kind of nuclear research planned at CERN. Paul Dixon, a psychology professor at the University of Hawaii at Hilo has been warning for decades that Fermilab's Tevatron is a super-nova waiting to happen. He has submitted an affidavit supporting Wagner's and Sancho's LHC lawsuit, who incidentally are also both Hawaiian. What's with these remote islanders? Does out of reach of the world equate with being out of touch with reality? I hope for the sake of every one's credibility that these lawsuits do not go beyond the Weekly World News stage, which is where they belong.
What nut bars.
Monday, April 7, 2008
The audacity of two dopes
Monday, March 10, 2008
New perspective on black holes
J.R. Minkel writes in the March 6, 2008 edition of Scientific American online about the effort by researchers led by Ulf Leonhardt of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland to mimic the behaviour of the physics that occurs at the event horizon of a black hole. Notwithstanding that I have a very clear rationalization of exactly why light cannot escape a black hole — light can't be generated there because once past the event horizon the electrons have been stripped from the nuclei of their atoms and visible light is caused by semi-transitional changes in the electron energy clouds of atoms, in other words, oscillations of a stable atomic configuration — the article is notable for its compelling and rather elegant analogy of a black hole. Minkel writes:The key to producing a black hole analogue, Leonhardt and his colleagues explain, is to force a fluid like medium to slosh faster than waves can ripple through it.
I have described the singularity of a black hole as being a point in space which is so dense with concentrated matter that space would need to define a whole new point source of origins around it and that this creates an intense gravity well. But that does not address the dynamics of how the black hole — dynamics implicating a temporal factor — acquires its singularity, merely what it does. Leonhardt's analogy is an apt one.
In other posts I have described the evolutionary process of the Universe — that it continues to create and perpetuate this creative process at the periphery and that what is created ultimately passes in time. Think of an eternally shrinking tuning fork which continues to vibrate if only by virtue of its ever diminishing proportions and you have what I perceive to happen to all matter, but uniformly as this dying process compounds logarithmically in scale as all of existence shrinks throughout a locality in space. It seems that the black hole has jumped the gun and exists outside of the normal distribution of things around it. I can only conclude that a black hole is initiated by a freak specific asymmetry of interacting gravitational fields which result in a singularity wherein the cancellation of space fields (read my theory of gravity) stimulates the creation of a point source of gravitation absent of any matter at the time of its creation but providing an intense gravity well into which matter is eventually drawn.
This idea suggests that due to the dynamics of this expanding Universe a black hole will eventually slowly morph as the space which it replaces becomes the space which it displaces as it is redefined once the destructive interference of the receding gravity fields has subsided sufficiently. This would lead to a re genesis of sorts, whereby all the matter that represent it bursts forth in a mini big bang, a different type of nova, a resolution between matter and space.
