Lifeboat Foundation

face_with_colon_three year 2022.

AdS/CFT Proves Its Usefulness

One of the first uses of AdS/CFT had to do with understanding black holes. Theoreticians had long been grappling with a paradox thrown up by these enigmatic cosmic objects. In the 1970s Stephen Hawking showed that black holes emit thermal radiation, in the form of particles, because of quantum mechanical effects near the event horizon. In the absence of infalling matter, this “Hawking” radiation would cause a black hole to eventually evaporate. This idea posed a problem. What happens to the information contained in the matter that formed the black hole? Is the information lost forever? Such a loss would go against the laws of quantum mechanics, which say that information cannot be destroyed.

Continue reading “Is Our Universe a Hologram? Physicists Debate Famous Idea on Its 25th Anniversary” »

That means that these two people will say that the state of reality is different – they’d have different facts about where the particle is.

There are may other oddities about quantum mechanics, too. Particles can be entangled in a way that enables them to somehow share information instantaneously even if they’re light years apart, for example. This challenges another common intution: that objects need a physical mediator to interact.

Physicists have therefore long debated how to interpret quantum mechanics. Is it a true and objective description of reality? If so, what happens to all the possible outcomes that we don’t measure? The many worlds interpretation argues they do happen – but in parallel universes.

Do we live in a multiverses or a cyclic universe? Most cosmologists today accept the universe underwent a very rapid period of expansion called inflation. But inflation seems to lead to an infinite multiverse. Not everyone is happy with this multiverse ; and some cosmologists have sought alternatives to inflation. These alternative schemes are often cyclic. The chief proponent of one such cyclic model is 2020 Nobel Prize Winner Sir Roger Penrose. In this video the father of inflation Alan Guth and Sir Roger discuss the pros and cons of the inflationary multiverse versus Sir Roger’s Conformal Cyclic Universe.
We highly recommend watching our film on eternal inflation with Alan Guth and colleagues.

and our film on CCC with Roger Penrose and colleagues.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVDJJVoTx7s.
and other films in our Before the Big Bang Series which features Stephen Hawking, Alex Vilenkin and others.

Having more tools helps; having the right tools is better. Utilizing multiple dimensions may simplify difficult problems—not only in science fiction but also in physics—and tie together conflicting theories.

For example, Einstein’s theory of general relativity —which resides in the fabric of space-time warped by planetary or other massive objects—explains how gravity works in most cases. However, the theory breaks down under extreme conditions such as those existing in black holes and cosmic primordial soups.

An approach known as superstring theory could use another dimension to help bridge Einstein’s theory with quantum mechanics, solving many of these problems. But the necessary evidence to support this proposal has been lacking.

Scientists relied on the holographic principle, which suggests that the two existing theories – particles and gravity – are equivalent.

The ‘ultramassive’ black hole discovery has big implications for our future understanding of space.

The Big Bang may have not been alone. The appearance of all the particles and radiation in the universe may have been joined by another Big Bang that flooded our universe with dark matter particles. And we may be able to detect it.

In the standard cosmological picture the early universe was a very exotic place. Perhaps the most momentous thing to happen in our cosmos was the event of inflation, which at very early times after the Big Bang sent our universe into a period of extremely rapid expansion.

Continue reading “What if The Universe Started With a Dark Big Bang?” »

Scientists at Durham University say the black hole is 30 billion times the size of the sun.

The story of modern physics has been one of reductionism. We do not need a vast encyclopedia to understand the inner workings of Nature. Rather, we can describe a near-limitless range of natural phenomena, from the interior of a proton to the creation of galaxies, with apparently unreasonable efficiency using the language of mathematics. In the words of theoretical physicist Eugene Wigner, ‘The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve. We should be grateful for it.’

The mathematics of the twentieth century described a Universe populated by a limited number of different types of fundamental particles interacting with each other in an arena known as spacetime according to a collection of rules that can be written down on the back of an envelope. If the Universe was designed, it seemed, the designer was a mathematician.

Today, the study of black holes appears to be edging us in a new direction, towards a language more often used by quantum computer scientists. The language of information. Space and time may be emergent entities that do not exist in the deepest description of Nature. Instead, they are synthesized out of entangled quantum bits of information in a way that resembles a cleverly constructed computer code. If the Universe is designed, it seems, the designer is a programmer.