Black Holes: My Idea

By Frank Waszut

If you have only been reading this blog you may have drawn the conclusion that I'm an acute narcissist with psychopathic tendencies that can be somewhat of a womanizer at times. You've probably read my rants and stories about imbibing mass quantities of alcohol, hooking up with various women, bar fights, turning churches into gay bars, how America is a fascist police state, the rampant closet racism that still goes on, etc. What you may not know is that I have another passion which is theoretical physics especially in regards to black holes. For many of you the knowledge you have of black holes might only come from science fiction movies which believe is not a bad introduction into the realm of physics and cosmology. While science fiction might make some gross approximations at times it does encourage people to think critically of their reality which is the goal of all empirical schools of thought.

While most will allow their inquiry to end their I am way more curious than that and have become absolutely fascinated with the human endeavor of trying to understand what most say cannot be understood and one of the biggest mysteries in our reality are black holes. For those that need an understanding of what we know of them as of now, black holes are basically immensely dense objects that cause what could be looked at as a whirl pool in the space-time fabric if you can look at space-time as one massive galactic ocean. The pull of their gravity is so strong that nothing can escape from one once it's event horizon; not even photons or light as it is commonly called which makes observing them or taking measurements of them quite an arduous, and some would say improbable, task. The reason for that is any attempt at measuring the contents of a black hole wouldn't yield any results since there would be a way to extract that information; that's the common consensus anyway.

There is another possibility. One that popped in my head while reading an article of Scientific American on the subject of the nature of black holes. Something jumped out at me when it was stated that black holes can only be observed indirectly via their mass, spin, and charge since technically making a direct observation is improbable since they do not allow visible light to escape as well as any other information. I'm sure some of you maybe asking yourself this. Why make such a big deal about measuring what's in a black hole when there is no way of doing so? The answer is quantum gravity as well as finding the existence of a particle of gravity called a graviton which the existence of is purely theoretical at this point since there is no experimental evidence of it. However, I think I might have come up with an answer and it's answer that has been staring us in the face this whole time and goes off of my understanding of relativity, quantum mechanics, string theory, and the holographic principle.

This whole quandary about black holes started with Einstein's theory of  special relativity in 1905 which postulated the existence of black holes. Einstein viewed the that matter of our universe "floating" on an invisible ocean of space and time which he viewed as space time. This theory led to his famous equation that postulated that energy is equal to mass times the speed of light squared. In other words, mass and energy in the same thing. This also meant that space and time are relative to our location. This built of of Sir Isaac Newtons work on the subject of gravity and Einstein saw all matter as being able to cause dips in the space-time fabric or ocean if your will. He theorized that there would be objects so massive and dense that they would form dips in the space-time fabric that gravity would be so strong to the point that not even light could escape and since all matter is the result of absorbing and reflecting photons then such matter wouldn't be able to escape either given the fact that matter is limited by the speed of light or photons if you will and not even photons would be able to escape their pull. Einstein saw the universe as static and unchanging. Many that know about quantum physics and cosmological inflation might go on and on about how he was wrong but this is the wrong train of thought. Since the time of Einstein's passing the study of physics has evolved and many physicists have access to tools that can yield measurements that weren't available to Einstein during his time. During his last days Einstein spent his time working on grand unification theory that could rectify his theories on the nature of reality with another theory (Quantum Mechanics) due to his equations breaking down at a black hole.

Quantum Mechanics was a burgeoning theory towards the end of Einstein's life and started with Planck's Law which was devised by Max Planck by taking into account Ludwig Boltzmann's statistical interpretation of thermodynamics to explain his hypothesis on how energy is radiated and absorbed in discrete "quanta" "or "energy elements".  Others instrumental in this field of study were Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Louis de Broglie, Arthur Compton, Albert Einstein (as before mentioned), Erwin Schrödinger, Max Born, John von Neumann, Paul Dirac, Enrico Fermi, Wolfgang Pauli, Max von Laue, Freeman Dyson, David Hilbert, Wilhelm Wien, Satyendra Nath Bose, Arnold Sommerfeld and you can click on their names to go their individual Wikipedia pages and I highly suggest doing so. Even though Einstein had a part in developing quantum mechanics he was deeply troubled by it because it went against his relativistic and deterministic view of reality. In order to understand this one must understand what quantum mechanics entails first and where it takes place, or where we commonly see it taking place.

Quantum Mechanics takes place in the microscopic realm of reality, think bacteria by smaller by many many orders of magnitude. These are realms where gravity is very weak to non-existent. At this realm all matter is made up of elementary particles (quarks, leptons, bosons, and composite particles such as atoms and molecules). The thing about elementary particles is that exhibit both wave and particle properties which would become called wave-particle duality and central part of quantuim mechanics. With out the influence of gravity particles do many things that defy deterministic logic. They can be in multiple and all places at once (quantum superposition) and only their momentum or postion can be measure with any amount of certainty (Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle). If you measure it's speed to a degree of certainty then you lose certainty of its position and vice versa. In other words Quantum Mechanics was saying that reality is not deterministic is actually probabilistic in nature. Einstein responded to this assertion by stating that, "My God does not play dice." This is what set Einstein off on his quest to unify relativity and quantum mechanics into a simple framework that could explain the nature of both seemingly contradictory realms but unfortunately like I said before Einstein died before such a desire was achieved and the physics world was left with a quandary.

I mean how could nature appear to be both probabilistic from one perspective and deterministic from another? This did not make sense and every equation to rectify this dilemma has ended in infinity or a singularity which to put in layman's terms means that they didn't know. This is very troubling or as another esteemed theoretical physicist, Michio Kaku, put it, "It means that the Universe is smarter than we are". Being that humanity is egocentric in nature. We could accept that we aren't the center of the universe and only composed an incredibly minute part of it but the fact that even our brightest minds couldn't figure out it's nature is what could be labeled as traumatizing. It seemed as thought our cognition had hit a dead end and we would be at the mercy of reality's logic for the foreseeable future. We would be slaves to a reality that could throw curveballs that pass through bats without even being affected by the wood. At least that was the perception but the thing about intuition and consciousness is that it is very stubborn. It is both our greatest strength and weakness. In the respect for empirical inquiry our brightest minds were far from done.

The focus of this inquiry shifted directly at black holes because the answer for unification would likely be in them (or on one; I'll explain that one in second). There was huge debate between experts on the study of black holes or more specifically what happens to information that falls into one (I.e. all known and unknown matter being information). The three physicists involved in this debate were Stephen Hawking, Leonard Susskind, and Gerard't Hooft. Hawking postulated that once information enters a black hole it is lost forever; Susskind and Hooft disagreed. This would to a decades long debate of what became known as the Information Loss Paradox since a commonly held assumption of science is that information is never lost or destroyed and can only be transformed. This debate eventually led to two theories that would help to rectify the perceived contradictions between probabilistic and deterministic point of views.

First up is string theory which Susskind is considered one of the fathers of. It posits that elementary particles are not point like but in reality are strings their quantum nature is the result these strings vibrating like strings on a guitar when struck and our reality is the symphony of these strings. It has become a candidate for a grand unified theory since it accounts for both the deterministic and probabilistic nature of our universe since the exact location and speed of these strings can only be deduced to probabilities but the ends of them can be talked about in a determinist sense. This raised the question of what is at the end of these strings? What keeps the strings tight and bound? The theoretical answer to this has been quantum gravity or more specifically an elementary particle of gravity called a graviton that is yet to be discovered or even proven to exists. Just keep that though in mind as I continue into the next theory that was born from the debate on information loss; the holographic principle.

The holographic principle states that our universe can be looked upon as a 2 dimensional structure of information painted on our cosmological horizon and appears to be three dimensional from the macroscopic perspective. In other words the way that we perceive our reality is an illusion projection from a 2 dimensional plane outside of space-time. To put it into even a simpler sense our reality is like the hologram of Princess Leah being projected out from an R2-D2. This theory along with String Theory was enough to get Stephen Hawking to admit that he was wrong.

According to these theories when information goes into a black hole it is encoded on its surface and everything that can be known about the black hole's contents can be construed from its surface since the amount of information in the three dimensional volume of a black hole can't exceed the amount on it's two dimensional surface and the math backs it up so if you were to watch something or someone (hopefully it's a person that you wouldn't to see ever again) the last thing you would see of them as they passed the even horizon (the point of no return) would be there two dimensional image before it was condensed down to a non-visible Planck scale. To understand that if a Planck Scale were on a proton and you expanded that proton to the size of the visible universe (41.7 Billion light years in diameter) then it would be approximately the size of a tree. Some would argue that information would be destroyed once it hit the black hole's singularity but lately Susskind and Juan Maldecena (whom was also instrumental in the advent of the Holographic principle) have instead hypothesized that this singularity is nothing more than a wormhole as well as the physical presentation of quantum entanglement. Quantum entanglement states that two particles born from a singularity are perpetually connected regardless of distance and can communicate at speeds faster than light which in this case means they communicate instantaneously, even if they were separated by light years (the amount of distance it takes for photons to travel within a year). In other words it would mean, if proven, that our universe is entangled with other universes just like elementary particles or that our universe itself is a particle. The question is what would this particle be and that is where my idea for idea for what a black hole is might be an answer.

There is an old saying that the easiest place to hide something is in plain sight because the obvious places are the last place that one would look. That is how misdirection and illusions work, it is source of the magician's bread. We are use to finding elementary particles on microscopic scales where gravity is weakest. The problem is that our brightest have been searching for gravitons in a realm where gravity is close to non-existent and very faint at best. It's like looking for water molecules in a rock in the desert. Here's another thing black holes and elementary particles can only be measured by their mass, spin, and charge. Black holes are MASSIVE objects that are also incredibly dense. Like has been said before light can't even escape from them. Yet it can only be described in the same terms that we describe objects on microscopic scales. What if a black hole was the particle of gravity that we have been looking for this entire time that has been staring us back in the face, "saying he look at me"? It makes even more sense due to the fact that black holes can't be directly observed, we can only observe the effects they have on matter. This is same train of thought that led to the discovery of the Higgs Boson (particle of space-time) since we could only observe the effects that particle collisions at the LHC (Lardge Hadron Collider) have on it. Why couldn't a similar particle be observable on macroscopic scales where gravity is stronger or where gravity is the strongest; a black hole?

Maybe the matter of our universe are strung by the particle that is graviton which could be a string itself. Maybe the theories of relativity and quantum mechanics are not in conflict at all. We just perceive it that way since we are overlooking something and when do and don't have an answer we as a species have conflict over what the answer could be. This is just my idea and I could be wrong or right but it's definitely one I will elaborate on in the future.