PROGRESS AND BLACK HOLES....

I love to listen to Morgan Freeman, especially when he is narrating about black holes and gently twinkling as he expounds on esoteric points regarding quantum mechanics. As if there were real mechanics involved.

If NPR were sponsoring this, we could listen to Click and Clack the Tappet brothers yapping about Schroedinger’s Cat trying to tell the customer that the cat is both alive and dead!


I watched the argument about Hawking Radiation and Leonard Susskind endless propeller explanation. Hawking Radiation is the little half of the Big and Little discussion. Little involves the spontaneous emergence from nothing of opposing pairs of subatomic particles, one particle positive, and one particle negative. (No one has ever proven the existence of Hawking Radiation except on the blackboard). These two particles instantly annihilate each other. Lots of that going on at a subatomic level, not a fun
neighborhood to live in I am thinking.

The disagreement came about between these two famous physicists regarding whether or not black holes violate the Law of Conservation of Information. Um, that sounds an awful lot like the Law of Conservation of Energy that states that energy may neither be created nor destroyed thus the sum of all the energies in the system is a constant.


Somehow I must have missed the class on Conservation of Information, assuming the corollary holds equivalently states that information can neither be created or destroyed, thus the sum of
all information in the system is a constant. I think I fell asleep.

To get back to the Hawking Radiation for a moment. Apparently the paired subatomic particles that come into existence from nothing (cannot be created, they had to come from SOME where, recycled from a worm hole maybe?) do not destroy each other if they are created at the edge of a black hole, such as right near the event horizon where stuff slows down…a lot.

So the negative charged particle falls into the black hole and being negative mass, contributes to the gradual shrinkage of the black hole. The positively charge particle escapes the black hole in the form of radiation…Hawking Radiation. (which has never been measured I think). That is kind of cool actually.


Hawking states that information is lost. Gasp! Susskind states that
information is not lost. Which he demonstrates by describing a plane flying into the black hole with a propeller, on the end of the propeller is another propeller and so on until there is a film of propellers. At this point I decided both men are too brilliant for me and I watched House Hunters International.


Oh wait, I skipped the good part, the negative particle? All of those
billions and mega trillions of negative mass particles that keep shrinking the black hole eventually cause it to explode.

So there you have it, the basic engine of the universe that changes stuff, remember it neither creates or destroys the information, it just changes it. Schroedinger’s cat may be an exception as it can be both dead and alive. I have no doubt hopelessly compromised Quantum Mechanics as it is known today.


So what if the universe expands forever, it will still be making a lot of  noise on the way.

Study chapter 37 including footnotes, there will be a test on Friday, Class dismissed!