Wednesday 3 August 2011

Black Holes

I am not one of the worlds great physicist, I'm not even one of the worlds great spellers, but I like to think I have a brain. So when watching a documentary on Steven Hawking and his view on Black Holes I was painfully reminded why I didn't take up hard science as a career.

Black holes are amongst the most powerful forces in nature, capable of crushing whole stars and indeed solar systems while being no larger than a pea. This is thanks to the frankly silly amount of mass compacted, with a staggering amount of densely, into a small space. We use metaphors like "sucking" and "trapped" when in reality it's just another way of "falling". Now, according to Hawking, once matter has passed what is called the event horizon (a mathematical, not physical, edge to the Black Hole) it would be impossible to stop falling. The problem is what happens next.

Now according to most people there are two possible arguments. The first states that all the matter in the Black Hole eventually vanishes. Just that, vanish, cease to exist. According to Hawkins this is what happens and it breaks just about every rule in the book. Matter is simply organised energy and one of the basic rules out there is that energy (and thus matter) cannot be created or destroyed. only converted. The theory flat out tells us that in a Black Hole the forces involved supereed the laws of physics. Unfortunately, if this is true, it leads to a problem. Black Holes are so powerful and so immense that the universe just couldn't exist, as we know it does. It would have been sucked up long long ago. There are just that many of the blasted things out there. Now a good number of Physicists have also noticed that and come up with the only solution, Black Holes are finite and do eventually stop.

But what happens to the matter they sucked up? When those forces end, a good question itself is how, what happens. Now Hawking's theory tels us... nothing happens. After all if the matter and energy no longer exists then neither do the forces that they exert. It wraps up the problem in a nice little bow. The problem is, of course, without matter, little things like Existence itself would have been destroyed long ago.

Now a good number of other, less famous thinkers, suggest that doesn't happen. They suggest that the Black Hole eventually traps itself. With nothing escaping matter just continues to spiral deeper and deeper into itself and that's it. The Black Hole stops exerting forces and collapses. The key to this is a little loop hole in Hawkins math that points out that a Black Hole produces heat. Incredible amounts of heat that just bleeds off into space.

Now as this documentary tried to explain this I paused it got up and ranted at a wall for an hour. The reason for this is simple, either I'm seeing something 99% of the most brilliant people in the world haven't or I'm missing something fundamental. The problem is because I'm coming from it with the basics and not convoluted, unproven, math and vague imagery I don't think I'm tied up in the decades of linear thinking these people have caved out for themselves.

Heat, much like light and matter and anything else, cannot escape a Black Hole. If the forces inside are creating more and more heat in a denser and denser point there can only be one solution. The forces acting within would have to reach a critical point where there is more energy inside trying to get out than there is gravity pulling it in. The more a Black Hole absorbs the more energy that would be eventually produced. The result would be, what people once suggested could be called, a White Hole. Or, put more simply, kaboom. An enormous kaboom. The matter, once trapped, would break forth and well miniature big bang is the best description I can come up with.

There is obviously a complex and elaborate theory that states I'm wrong. If some one, anyone, has it please tell me. Otherwise I'll return to Sci-Fi reviews and fan fiction as soon as possible