OT: Black hole picture captured for first time in space ‘breakthrough’

[Gsinill]

Live press conference:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/apr/10/black-hole-picture-captured-for-first-time-in-space-breakthrough
Cool stuff...

[ultraman6970]

Now that they can see them, they can figure it out what to do with them.

Wormholes are comming soon? soon like in 100 years?

[MattTuck]

This is cool.

But the more creepy stuff is the theory that we're just a 3D hologram projected on the surface of a sphere. Our understanding of physics has changed so much in the last 100 years.

[Dave B]

My students and I watched it, the panel was way over their head, but the idea of working with a multi-national group to create a telescope the size of our planet is pretty sweet. The picture was a bit anti-climatic, but the fact we can now prove, see, and document something we have NEVER seen before is a pretty cool moment.

[Jaybee]

This is cool.

But the more creepy stuff is the theory that we're just a 3D hologram projected on the surface of a sphere. Our understanding of physics has changed so much in the last 100 years.

More reading on this? Sounds interesting!

[Gsinill]

My students and I watched it, the panel was way over their head, but the idea of working with a multi-national group to create a telescope the size of our planet is pretty sweet. The picture was a bit anti-climatic, but the fact we can now prove, see, and document something we have NEVER seen before is a pretty cool moment.

Same here, way smarter people than I.
Really liked the guy talking about the logistics and yes, the international cooperation is encouraging in today's world.
Also baffled by the fact that the picture taken is actually 55 million years old!

[MattTuck]

More reading on this? Sounds interesting!

Yeah, I'm going to briefly describe the idea (probably not 100% accurate), and then you can search for more info.

There is this a quandry between two ideas. One is that the speed of light is the fastest speed in the universe. But at the same time, we observe something called quantum entanglement (or as Einstein called it, "Sooky action at a distance") in which it appears information is transmitted over a distance instantaneously, and seems to suggest that there is no speed limit.

One of the solutions to this is the holographic universe, in which space is not really space, but rather a projection of a 2 dimensional plane at the edge of the universe. And so when we see quantum entanglement across space, it may just be a projection of something on the 2D plane.

From this link, here's a bit more to chew on, and a book for more reading.
https://www.insidescience.org/news/fabric-reality-may-be-spookier-we-imagine-new-book-argues

By synthesizing many state-of-the-art ideas in physics research, Musser presents a highly plausible argument that our perception of space may be an illusion. By space, I don’t just mean outer space, but the entire world around us, including the three dimensions of your bedroom, the colorful landscape outside your window, and the distance between your home and workplace. Yes, your commute may fundamentally be an illusion, according to these emerging theories. It still may take time and energy to get to where you need to go, but what you see outside your car window may not be quite as it appears.

This kind of radical rethinking is not unprecedented. We went through a similar situation with gravity. In Isaac Newton's picture of gravity, one even he found troubling at the time, two objects such as the Earth and the sun pulled at each other even though they were separated by great distances: it was as if they were exerting invisible force fields on one another. In Einstein's much different picture of gravity, the sun's mass bends the fabric of the solar system like a bowling ball on a canvas. Earth and the other planets roll around this distorted canvas, producing the still-convincing illusion that their orbits are caused by an invisible force field.

Knowing that history, it's not a surprise that physicists are reimagining the concept of space. But it's still shocking to read Musser's explanation that it may not fundamentally exist. The book quotes Caltech cosmologist and writer Sean Carroll, who said, "Space is totally overrated…totally bogus. Space is just an approximation that we find useful in certain circumstances."

While I remain at least a little skeptical — space seems to work pretty darned well in describing the universe around us — the book presents thought-provoking arguments to reconsider the fabric of reality. There are enough anomalies in the universe to give me pause. And as Musser points out, Albert Einstein was one of the first to have pinpointed them.

In the 1930s, Einstein used the term "spooky action at a distance" to describe a possible consequence of quantum mechanics. In the then-emerging description of the submicroscopic world, two particles separated at birth — created from a process such as the decay of an atom — can continue to affect each other even if they travel to opposite sides of the universe. They would be able to influence each other even faster than light could travel between them. A skeptical Einstein coined the "spooky" expression to critique what he saw as this strange prediction of quantum mechanics. He thought that a more complete theory of nature would rule out this apparent violation of the ultimate speed limit, the speed of light. However, experimenters have since confirmed that this "spooky action" — more properly known as "quantum entanglement" — really happens.

Now, physicists at the cutting edge are increasingly finding that this kind of spookiness may describe reality even more than the famous physicist may have imagined, affecting our deepest notions about space.

The distance between objects — or their close proximity — may all be illusory, according to the research that Musser describes in his book.

Recently, physicists discovered that it is much easier to calculate the outcomes of super-complicated multi-particle decays if you don't worry about the local space around them. Previously, physicists (and graduate physics students) would painstakingly analyze each particle's neighbors in these decays, but if you ignore their apparent configurations in space, you can get the same correct answers more easily.

And then there is the white whale of physics — the black hole. An intense subject of study, these objects may hold clues about many things including entanglement. Black holes swallow matter voraciously, but where does it go? Even though current theory suggests that the center of a black hole contains a completely unintuitive feature — a point of infinite density known as a singularity — physicists know they're missing something about black holes. Could our concept of space as a storehouse for matter be part of the problem?

Musser points out that one black hole with twice the mass of another black hole should be eight times as big, just as blowing up a balloon to twice its radius makes it eight times as big. But a black hole with twice the radius only appears to have two times the mass, possibly meaning that it is storing less matter than expected. This suggests numerous possibilities, such as matter going elsewhere in the universe — or maybe some aspect of its outer appearance is illusory. Fortunately, the behavior of a black hole at its outer surface — the event horizon — seems to be a fertile ground for understanding the entire black hole and discovering new physics. And that brings us to what may really be going on with space.

Just as the outer surface of the black hole could explain what is happening in its interior, the "holographic universe" theory suggests that the interior of our universe may be described by understanding the physics of the universe's edge, which, unfortunately, we cannot access. As an analogy, imagine if we could understand absolutely everything going inside the Earth by understanding the behavior of its surface. The Earth is three dimensions, but its surface is described by two dimensions — latitude and longitude. Similarly, the boundaries of the observable universe would have one fewer dimension than the universe's interior, but could perhaps completely explain its workings, according to the holographic principle.

[colker]

How was the image formed using all the telescopes? Is it the same light travelling mechanics as a rangefinder focusing mechanism?

[verticaldoug]

Yeah, I'm going to briefly describe the idea (probably not 100% accurate), and then you can search for more info.

There is this a quandry between two ideas. One is that the speed of light is the fastest speed in the universe. But at the same time, we observe something called quantum entanglement (or as Einstein called it, "Sooky action at a distance") in which it appears information is transmitted over a distance instantaneously, and seems to suggest that there is no speed limit.

One of the solutions to this is the holographic universe, in which space is not really space, but rather a projection of a 2 dimensional plane at the edge of the universe. And so when we see quantum entanglement across space, it may just be a projection of something on the 2D plane.

From this link, here's a bit more to chew on, and a book for more reading.
https://www.insidescience.org/news/fabric-reality-may-be-spookier-we-imagine-new-book-argues

Your first problem is you are talking about Space as if it is separate from time. It is not. It is space-time.

When you go back far enough, the big bang is a when not a where. Since there is no place no time. It is the beginning of space time. Hence, the big bang occurs everywhere simultaneously.

As for the black hole, you aren't really seeing the black hole. You are only seeing the event horizon at which no light can escape, you have no information transmission. The singularity may or may not be on the other side.

I like the concept of entanglement since in theory we can then travel backwards in time. I hope for buy Amazon when it IPOs

[MattTuck]

Your first problem is you are talking about Space as if it is separate from time. It is not. It is space-time.

When you go back far enough, the big bang is a when not a where. Since there is no place no time. It is the beginning of space time. Hence, the big bang occurs everywhere simultaneously.

As for the black hole, you aren't really seeing the black hole. You are only seeing the event horizon at which no light can escape, you have no information transmission. The singularity may or may not be on the other side.

I like the concept of entanglement since in theory we can then travel backwards in time. I hope for buy Amazon when it IPOs

To be clear, wasn't trying to defend a thesis in theoretical physics or anything :) Just saying there are some pretty mind-bending theories out there.

[OtayBW]

This is cool.

But the more creepy stuff is the theory that we're just a 3D hologram projected on the surface of a sphere. Our understanding of physics has changed so much in the last 100 years.
We ARE the sphere.....


P.S. I'm not kidding.

[texbike]

Yeah, I'm going to briefly describe the idea (probably not 100% accurate), and then you can search for more info.

There is this a quandry between two ideas. One is that the speed of light is the fastest speed in the universe. But at the same time, we observe something called quantum entanglement (or as Einstein called it, "Sooky action at a distance") in which it appears information is transmitted over a distance instantaneously, and seems to suggest that there is no speed limit.

One of the solutions to this is the holographic universe, in which space is not really space, but rather a projection of a 2 dimensional plane at the edge of the universe. And so when we see quantum entanglement across space, it may just be a projection of something on the 2D plane.

From this link, here's a bit more to chew on, and a book for more reading.
https://www.insidescience.org/news/fabric-reality-may-be-spookier-we-imagine-new-book-argues

Wow! This is only slightly less difficult to comprehend than the formula for trail. ;)

[cardcatalog]

Yeah, I'm going to briefly describe the idea (probably not 100% accurate), and then you can search for more info.

There is this a quandry between two ideas. One is that the speed of light is the fastest speed in the universe. But at the same time, we observe something called quantum entanglement (or as Einstein called it, "Sooky action at a distance") in which it appears information is transmitted over a distance instantaneously, and seems to suggest that there is no speed limit.

One of the solutions to this is the holographic universe, in which space is not really space, but rather a projection of a 2 dimensional plane at the edge of the universe. And so when we see quantum entanglement across space, it may just be a projection of something on the 2D plane.

From this link, here's a bit more to chew on, and a book for more reading.
https://www.insidescience.org/news/fabric-reality-may-be-spookier-we-imagine-new-book-argues

I love this idea.

To go even further off topic: anyone else read Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin? The trilogy is great, although an extremely grim view of existence. The idea of the projection above is making me think about the last book a bunch. I should probably join a scifi forum somewhere.

[colker]

We ARE the sphere.....


P.S. I'm not kidding.

meaning substance over form/ aspect? "Over" meaning form is illusion?

[redir]

I'm gonna have to dust off the old bong for this thread.

[goonster]

but the fact we can now prove, see, and document something we have NEVER seen before is a pretty cool moment.

The fact that it looks how we predicted it would is also really important.

[ducati2]

How it looked 55 million years ago!

[colker]

How it looked 55 million years ago!

the square tape BB era.

[ScottW]

I'm gonna have to dust off the old bong for this thread.

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/fTQw7lljLIo/sddefault.jpg

[FlashUNC]

Fermis paradox is the one that still gets me. Especially because there's no good answer to the problem.

[donevwil]

" Wanna take a ride? "

[MattTuck]

Fermis paradox is the one that still gets me. Especially because there's no good answer to the problem.

So you're not buying the explanation that oumuamua was an alien probe? :)

[Gsinill]

The fact that it looks how we predicted it would is also really important.

There was actually a question from the audience related to this. Basically how surprised the scientists were that AE was pretty much dead on with his theory.

Here's what one of the scientists had to say:

"Sometimes the math looks ugly, but there's a really strong aesthetic in theoretical physics. And the Einstein equations are beautiful," said physicist Avery Broderick. "In my experience, nature wants to be beautiful, and that’s one of the striking elements of Einstein’s description of gravity. It is fundamentally one of the most beautiful theories that we have. For that reason alone, and the long history of Einstein being proven right, I suppose we’re not terribly surprised."

[FlashUNC]

So you're not buying the explanation that oumuamua was an alien probe? :)

If it was, that's bad news for us.

[JStonebarger]

If it was, that's bad news for us.

That they spotted us or that they didn't seem to notice?

[Shoeman]

Fake news!!!!

[denapista]

Black holes


video.nationalgeographic.com/video/101-videos/00000165-ed1b-d475-abe7-ef5b22330000

[joosttx]

How it looked 55 million years ago!

From whose prespectivd? 😀

[HTupolev]

That they spotted us or that they didn't seem to notice?
Doesn't really matter. If Oumuamua is a probe, the troubling implications go way beyond Oumuamua itself.
If interstellar spacefaring civilizations are something that has a reasonable probability of arising, then on cosmological timescales, they should have no trouble colonizing galaxies very rapidly. So then why are the skies silent?

[CNY rider]

How was the image formed using all the telescopes? Is it the same light travelling mechanics as a rangefinder focusing mechanism?

Here's the story of how they did it:

https://www.amazon.com/Einsteins-Shadow-Black-Astronomers-Unseeable-ebook/dp/B075WSLWFX

(In a remarkable coincidence I took it out of the library 2 weeks ago and finished it Monday, unaware of the pictures to be released.)

[OtayBW]

meaning substance over form/ aspect? "Over" meaning form is illusion?
People try to explain - even measure - the Universe as something 'out there' from our perception of reality as being 'in here'. There is really no distinction between the two, and that is part of the problem. Metaphorically, there is a fairly famous Japanese saying that cautions us (more or less) not to mistake our finger pointing at the moon for the moon itself....

[robertbb]

On the size of the telescope:

"To give you an idea of how small a thing you can see, if you're sitting in a pub in Perth, you would be able to see a guy sitting in the pub in Sydney, not only would you be able to see him, you'd be able to see his eye colour, and you'd be able to see the brand of beer he was drinking," she said

The exact distance between Perth and Sydney is: 3,933km (2443 miles).

By way of comparison, for all you North Americans, the distance between Mexico and Canada is: 3,624km (2251 miles).

Wow. Just ****ing wow.

[cloudguy]

Fermis paradox is the one that still gets me. Especially because there's no good answer to the problem.

Off the top of my head, I'd guess that all "intelligent" lifeforms eventually end up destroying themselves and their planet within a few 100,000 years. Just look at the trajectory here.

[Black Dog]

I love this idea.

To go even further off topic: anyone else read Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin? The trilogy is great, although an extremely grim view of existence. The idea of the projection above is making me think about the last book a bunch. I should probably join a scifi forum somewhere.

I have read the books. Really fascinating stuff.

[colker]

Off the top of my head, I'd guess that all "intelligent" lifeforms eventually end up destroying themselves and their planet within a few 100,000 years. Just look at the trajectory here.


Like , for example?

[54ny77]

Are there 1st Gen Di2 groups floating around in that black hole?

[CunegoFan]

Off the top of my head, I'd guess that all "intelligent" lifeforms eventually end up destroying themselves and their planet within a few 100,000 years. Just look at the trajectory here.

"Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space."

That might have something to do with it. Either that or everyone keeps their head down to hide from the MiGo and the Elder Things.

[verticaldoug]

This is a photo of Katie Bouman of MIT who was lead on the research to develop the algorithm to stitch together the data for the blackhole image. Those are her hard drives of data.

here's a link to her TED Talk walking through the subject from 2 yrs ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIvezCVcsYs

[verticaldoug]

Doesn't really matter. If Oumuamua is a probe, the troubling implications go way beyond Oumuamua itself.
If interstellar spacefaring civilizations are something that has a reasonable probability of arising, then on cosmological timescales, they should have no trouble colonizing galaxies very rapidly. So then why are the skies silent?

Except, Oumuamua is moving really slow on a cosmic scale to get anywhere interesting. The time component of SPACE-Time always gets in the way.

We literally just turned on our radio. We haven't heard anything in the first 1/10,000 of a second which we have been listening for a radio station and we wonder where everyone is.

There's lots of life out there. If chemosynthesis lifeforms can exist on earth in the black smokers in the middle of the ocean, we will probably find extra-terrestrial life inside our own solar system. We just may never meet intelligent in our small space-time.

Maybe Matt is right and we need to figure out entanglement so we can escape time.

[saab2000]

The presence of methane gas has recently been confirmed on Mars. Presumably near an extinct Martian cattle ranch. No other reasonable explanation.

[goonster]

Really enjoyed this presentation (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo)on the appearance of black holes, and he did a good job explaining a couple of aspects I found difficult to grasp before.

[martl]

The presence of methane gas has recently been confirmed on Mars. Presumably near an extinct Martian cattle ranch. No other reasonable explanation.
Rigt next to it they found a diary, writtn in martian. The last page read "it rained today, so we know climate change is a socialist hoax" ;)

Joking aside, i find it refreshing that in spite of all the political stupidity on all sides of the spectrum, still large-scale research like this (or the LHC, or many other projects) can still be created, and run, by people of all nations and color, and driven by curiosity alone.

[redir]

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/fTQw7lljLIo/sddefault.jpg

Exactly lol.

[bicycletricycle]

I have watched multiple lectures on the "reality is a hologram" thing. My brain doesn't work well enough to understand it though.

This is cool.

But the more creepy stuff is the theory that we're just a 3D hologram projected on the surface of a sphere. Our understanding of physics has changed so much in the last 100 years.

[Tickdoc]

Seems fuzzzy. I got new glasses and this lack of clarity is not helping. As for the physics, I’ll leave that to brains that are far better than mine. I still look up just go “wow” at the whole thing.

[deechee]

I didn't see the papers posted here so here (https://iopscience.iop.org/journal/2041-8205/page/Focus_on_EHT) ya go.

It's funny how my wife was so turned off by all the people on fb posting the exact same message of the black hole. Why post the same image over and over again?

I think the technology involved to produce this is mind blowing. The photo on the other hand I view as someone playing color by numbers. Woopee.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D3zl-UKWkAALZh-.jpg:large

[redir]

LOL I've been loving the memes coming out on this one.

https://scontent-iad3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/57028987_10156095534605779_6978385377035812864_n.j pg?_nc_cat=107&_nc_ht=scontent-iad3-1.xx&oh=3f5910a6206401b5b9e9aa95146aad33&oe=5D375F05

[livingminimal]

Black Hole? Stupid. Weak.

Get yourself one of these....
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/74/08/c8/7408c851b302925dbc04c07e50fdf394.jpg

Piloted by one of these...
https://i.imgur.com/NV69e0s.png

And just fold space until your hearts content.

[goonster]

Apparently there are people who are actually griping about the lack of resolution of the image, so here is a cool video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo), illustrating (at about 2:35) what 40 microarcseconds means.

[Marc40a]

Rigt next to it they found a diary, writtn in martian. The last page read "it rained today, so we know climate change is a socialist hoax" ;)

Joking aside, i find it refreshing that in spite of all the political stupidity on all sides of the spectrum, still large-scale research like this (or the LHC, or many other projects) can still be created, and run, by people of all nations and color, and driven by curiosity alone.

word.

[MattTuck]

Another interesting theory.

http://www.astronomy.com/news/2019/05/could-quantum-mechanics-explain-the-existence-of-space-time

Attempts to find coherent math that accommodates quantum weirdness with geometric gravity, though, have met formidable technical and conceptual roadblocks.

At least that has long been so for attempts to understand ordinary space-time. But clues to a possible path to progress have emerged from the theoretical study of alternate space-time geometries, thinkable in principle but with unusual properties. One such alternate, known as anti de Sitter space, is weirdly curved and tends to collapse on itself, rather than expanding as the universe we live in does. It wouldn’t be a nice place to live. But as a laboratory for studying theories of quantum gravity, it has a lot to offer. “Quantum gravity is sufficiently rich and confusing that even toy universes can shed enormous light on the physics,” writes Swingle, of the University of Maryland.

Studies of anti de Sitter space suggest, for instance, that the math describing gravity (that is, space-time geometry) can be equivalent to the math of quantum physics in a space of one less dimension. Think of a hologram — a flat, two-dimensional surface that incorporates a three-dimensional image. In a similar way, perhaps the four-dimensional geometry of space-time could be encoded in the math of quantum physics operating in three-dimensions. Or maybe you need more dimensions — how many dimensions are required is part of the problem to be solved.

....

That sounds like entangled particles must be able to communicate faster than light. Otherwise it’s impossible to imagine how one of them could know what was happening to the other across a vast space-time expanse. But they actually don’t send any message at all. So how do entangled particles transcend the space-time gulf separating them? Perhaps the answer is they don’t have to — because entanglement doesn’t happen in space-time. Entanglement creates space-time.
At least that’s the proposal that current research in toy universes has inspired. “The emergence of space-time and gravity is a mysterious phenomenon of quantum many-body physics that we would like to understand,” Swingle suggests in his Annual Review paper. Vigorous effort by several top-flight physicists has produced theoretical evidence that networks of entangled quantum states weave the space-time fabric. These quantum states are often described as “qubits” — bits of quantum information (like ordinary computer bits, but existing in a mix of 1 and 0, not simply either 1 or 0). Entangled qubits create networks with geometry in space with an extra dimension beyond the number of dimensions that the qubits live in. So the quantum physics of qubits can then be equated to the geometry of a space with an extra dimension. Best of all, the geometry created by the entangled qubits may very well obey the equations from Einstein’s general relativity that describe motion due to gravity — at least the latest research points in that direction. “Apparently, a geometry with the right properties built from entanglement has to obey the gravitational equations of motion,” Swingle writes. “This result further justifies the claim that space-time arises from entanglement.”

[Louis]

Another interesting theory.

http://www.astronomy.com/news/2019/05/could-quantum-mechanics-explain-the-existence-of-space-time

So much for Occam's razor.

[93KgBike]

I'm gonna have to dust off the old bong for this thread.

lol. apparently, 1000 years ago leading thinkers (https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/thousand-year-old-fox-snout-bag-held-potent-hallucinogens-/3010463.article) preferred cocaine & magic mushrroms!