I’m listening to an audiobook of A Brief History of Time, bopping along, and when I get to the chapter on black holes I’m suddenly “hold up, whaaa? . . .” And then I learn that “virtual particles” can somehow become “real particles” through “negative energy” and I’m thinking it sounds like a comic book where Batman saved the day by “reversing the polarity.”
In: 5
To understand it will be a good idea to backtrack in Science, and start wih Field Theory.
Back in the day, it was a big mystery, as to how light, could travel as a wave, through empty space. Because a wave needs a medium to travel through, you can’t have a wave in a vacuum. But empty space was much like a vacuum, there was no media to propagate the wave through.
Scientists used very creatively Schroedingers uncertaincy complex, to make a little fictive square in the universe. As a particles place and speed/direction can not be determined, if you determine one, the other becomes unknown. The smaller the fictive square was made, the more certain you knew where the particle was. And on the other hand, the speed and direction became more variable. That is to say, the potential energy of the particle becomes higher and higher, as you make your little square smaller.
Untill you square is small enough, that the potential energy is high enough, to conjure the particle from empty space out of nothing.
And voila, particles were popping up here there and everywhere in space, and that is how light as a wave could travel through space.
Problem was, that the particles weren’t there to be seen. So they got creative, they had some bits of a math, in a famous mathematicians equations, that noone knew what actually were or described. This math it was deduced, described the anti particle to a particle.
And so when you conjured a particle in empty space by pinpointing it’s place, an antiparticle would also be conjured. They exist just long enough for light waves to travel through, before they crash into each other and disappear again.
The math they had found, didn’t actually mathematically describe a complete opposite entity, to the particle, which it should. But then it was stated, that slight error, is why some particles dont collapse and disappear, and that’s why there are particles and matter in the universe in the first place. Because there is a slight discrepancy, between matter and anti matter.
Hohoho, I bet they ordered 10 shots in the bar after that one.
Is this utter idiocy? Yes most likely, recent findings would suggest it is. Observations by Physisicsts are never what they expect according to the theories they use. For example finding out there is exactly as much anti matter in the universe as matter, and so no slight discrepancy that could explain why matter is abundant and anti matter is not.
Hawkins takes this “thinking”, and puts it at the very edge of a black hole. And he says that in some rare cases, the 2 particles conjured will not crash into each other and disappear. Because one is right where it gets dragged into the black hole, while the other is just where it doesn’t.
The one that stays in known space, radiates energy. So to keep net energy at 0, the one that fell into the black hole must have had negative energy. Adding negative energy, means that the black hole is essentially getting dissolved. It will “evaporate” according to this theory.
He calls them virtual particles, because we apparantly can’t see this conjuring of particles, that makes light travel through empty space. They don’t exist, unless one of them falls into a black hole, so that they can’¨t collide.
It’s all made up nonsense. A good physicists has 2 conversation subjects that interest him; wormholes, and how utterly wrong physics is.
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