I took a physics course at a community college over 20 years ago and one of the things that stood out to me was the professor telling us not to overthink or assign too much romanticism to the idea of black holes.
His message was basically “it just means the escape velocity is greater than the speed of light… if you plug the size and mass of the universe into the escape velocity formula, the result you get back is greater than the speed of light, so our entire universe is a black hole.”
If this was being discussed at a community college decades ago then I think the new discoveries aren’t as revelatory as they would at first appear to the general public.
Scientist: Scientific discoveries are meaningless when taken out of context.
Journalist: Scientific discoveries are meaningless.
Journalist: What is context?
Context is text that served time in prison.
It balances out protext, figure it out rookie
Protext is what the really good journalists are writing.
another thing I learned at some point: Just because a physics formula returns a result, doesn’t mean that it’s reality
TBF black holes themselves were originally just the result of a Physics formula, but they eventually turned out to be a “reality”. Sometimes that shit happens, yo.
When I first saw pictures of galaxies as a kid I noticed they all looked like black holes.
In a way we’re all just bits of organic matter mid-flush, waiting for the Drainpipe of Destiny
In a way we’re all just bits of organic matter mid-flush, waiting for the Drainpipe of Destiny
Word
Interestingly, galaxies at the edge of our ability to perceive are in fact receding away from us at velocities greater than the speed of light.
Maybe it’s because they are outside the black hole and aren’t time dilated.
Wouldn’t that mean if we can see them that light can enter/escape a black hole?
Entering and escaping are two wildly different things.
It can enter, but not escape.
So that’s what Hotel California was about all along?
Why is there a warm smell of colitis in the air?
Light can enter a black hole perfectly fine - we would be able to see things outside of it, because the light is still following us. No light leaves the black hole (if it’s past the event horizon), so you can’t see into it.
Okay, so now you can barely afford your rent inside a black hole. Enjoy the enhanced granularity of your desperation!
That would explain why it feels like my bank account is being sucked dry.
Fortunately the universe can get Cosmic Overdraft Protection, for only a small annual fee and 23 squillion bazillion stomptillion dollars per occurrence.
What is this black hole, my ex-wife?
tugs collar
I can barely afford rent!
Well… the good news is you can stretch your income a bit further with spaghettification!
Beans are economical too
nuclear pasta is very energy dense
What if we’re not in a black hole, but in the aftermath of a vacuum decay event?
no my vacuum is working fine, thanks
But is your refrigerator running?
That is literally what the current big bang theory says! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflationary_epoch?wprov=sfla1
Look up vacuum decay. It’s theoretically a thing that can rewrite spacetime at a lower energy level, and would expand out from a point in a bubble. The expanding bubble would erase and rewrite everything it touched into the lower energy level.
Yes I know what vacuum decay is, and the thing I referenced, the inflaton field, is a hypothetized false vacuum near the very start of the universe, that went through this exact process, giving rise to our current vacuum and ending the hypothetized inflation era
I know there’s a hypothesis that our current vacuum could be metastable as well, but that’s a seperate thing
Yeah, I believe the Higgs field showed us to be metastable, unless new findings have invalidated that.
We’re inside a dust cup?
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Tax breaks for the rich is the only solution
I suddenly feel something trickling down from above. Is this what they were talking about all these years? Is this a good thing? It smells bad, like really bad. Like somebody is cooking meth while they have a near fatal case of diarrhea. What am I supposed to do?
Get hooked on meth, it’ll wildly change your priorities.
(This is a joke, please do not do this)
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so basically We’re out in butt fuck no where in space and the aliens aren’t coming any time soon cause they essentially live in New York City and we’re in a town in Iowa that no one has ever heard of.
typical.
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the galaxy.
Wait, we’re the hicks?!
Actually, that explains so much.
It’s entirely possible that there are no aliens in the “New York City” part of the universe.
Dense regions of space will have much more interactions between stellar systems and may not be stable enough for life to evolve. It could be why we haven’t seen anyone else, they’re all in their own little pockets of peace.
Being from Iowa, I take offense to that… But yes, you are correct.
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But then there’s the guy who added all the mass and energy of the observable universe, calculated its’ Schwarzschild Radius, and came up with 13.8 billion light years.
There’s also how our observable universe’s Hubble Horizon acts like a black hole event horizon, the way in which even the speed of light is insufficient to escape beyond.
A lot of the math inside a black hole is eerily similar to the math of our own horizon, as traced by the age of the universe plus the speed of light.
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Nah, there’s been a bunch of discussion about our entire universe being inside a black hole.
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There being a “bunch of discussion” doesn’t prove anything?
I believe MotoAsh was talking about the local hole which is different from the more recent we’re in a black hole discussion.
I was not stating that the unprovable is actually fact.
We should all be celebrating our good fortune, protection against a dark forest strike!
Except from aliens that are also stuck here with us
We’re not stuck in here with them. They’re stuck in here with us!
Annihilation is the correct response if truly they are intelligent. Even taking one of us as a pet could result in the stupid spreading.
Sucking us into a black hole WAS the attack.
Anyone got a link to either nasa or a good article explaining it?
Scientific American points to an important fact.
"With our latest surveys, such as the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) and Euclid, by my very rough estimation, we’ve taken pictures of somewhere around 100 million galaxies out of the two trillion or so estimated to exist in the entire observable universe.
Shamir’s paradigm-shattering conclusion relies on 263 of them."
They are discussing bias in the selection.
“Unfortunately, this kind of extreme selection introduces many opportunities for bias to creep in. When we test a new idea in cosmology—indeed, in all of science—we work to make our conclusion as robust as possible. For example, if we were to change any of these filtering steps, from the selection of survey region to the threshold for deciding whether to include a galaxy in the analysis, our results should hold up or at least show a clear trend where the signal becomes stronger. But there isn’t enough information about such methodological checks in Shamir’s paper to make that judgment, which casts doubt on the validity of the conclusions.”
I mean, we can talk about it for a bit, Angie, if it’d make you feel better, but that’s really about it, honestly.
Both are fair and valid.
Peaceful science & good housing should go hand in hand.
May be that’s why it sucks to live here… It’s related
hasn’t this been a theory for a while now? The event horizon of a black hole keeps information minus one dimension. and the theory goes that our entire universe is just at the edge or a black hole in a 4D universe
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It’s just black holes all the way down.
One has to wonder lol.
I got it! We’re within a simulation of the innards of a black hole. And that is the first time I’ve used the word “innards”. Lol
Don’t get me wrong, understanding the nature of the universe is valuable and noteworthy. But how would that information meaningfully impact anyone’s life or change their behavior or worldview beyond a general awe at the unfathomable mysteries we already have towards space as we’ve understood it for centuries? Especially in a way that would ne noticeable to this person. Am I meant to stare up at the sky from 8:15 to 8:30 every other night with my mouth agap while I try to wrap my mind around the spacetime bubble we all exist on the surface of? Or can I just eat dinner?
The reason research like this exists is because we don’t know what we don’t know. Results like these are meant to stoke curiousity so that more research can be done.
So on and so forth until one day you have horseshoe crabs saving millions of lives. But they didn’t know that would be the case when they started researching them crabs, function comes after exploration.
For sure, not undervaluing scientific research and exploration by any means. But Angie’s post seemed to be a call to action or an expectation of a greater reaction to potential findings from the general public. But A) it’s honestly the first I’ve heard about any such news. And B) I don’t think the vast majority of people would have any idea how to even process that information, let alone get excited about it or understand it’s full implications, or to have any sort of reaction to it at all.
Astronomy is critical towards understanding the foundational principles of reality. Observing the universe around us is the guide for where physics should follow
And I think most people would agree that understanding how our world works, the physics of it all, is very very useful in unforeseen ways. Cannot hope to make a circuit if you don’t know how electricity works, right?
Again, I’m not poopooing scientific endeavor. I love science. But this person seemed to be mystified that we weren’t all majorly reacting to this news as if this possible fact, in itself, was life changing. For most people, it changes nothing about their day to day lives.
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Yes, we ignore it. Given the size of the universe, if being inside a black implies any conseqences that will ever hurt us, it will be a process that takes billions of years to develop, giving the human race billions of years to either become extinct or solve the problem.
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