Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Tuesday February 27 2018, @03:33PM   Printer-friendly
from the did-it-never-happen,-or-was-it-unhappened? dept.

In the real world, your past uniquely determines your future. If a physicist knows how the universe starts out, she can calculate its future for all time and all space.

But a UC Berkeley mathematician has found some types of black holes in which this law breaks down. If someone were to venture into one of these relatively benign black holes, they could survive, but their past would be obliterated and they could have an infinite number of possible futures.

Such claims have been made in the past, and physicists have invoked "strong cosmic censorship" to explain it away. That is, something catastrophic -- typically a horrible death -- would prevent observers from actually entering a region of spacetime where their future was not uniquely determined. This principle, first proposed 40 years ago by physicist Roger Penrose, keeps sacrosanct an idea -- determinism -- key to any physical theory. That is, given the past and present, the physical laws of the universe do not allow more than one possible future.

But, says UC Berkeley postdoctoral fellow Peter Hintz, mathematical calculations show that for some specific types of black holes in a universe like ours, which is expanding at an accelerating rate, it is possible to survive the passage from a deterministic world into a non-deterministic black hole.

What life would be like in a space where the future was unpredictable is unclear. But the finding does not mean that Einstein's equations of general relativity, which so far perfectly describe the evolution of the cosmos, are wrong, said Hintz, a Clay Research Fellow.

Vitor Cardoso, João L. Costa, Kyriakos Destounis, Peter Hintz, Aron Jansen. Quasinormal Modes and Strong Cosmic Censorship. Physical Review Letters, 2018; 120 (3) DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.120.031103

Source: http://news.berkeley.edu/2018/02/20/some-black-holes-erase-your-past/


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by requerdanos on Tuesday February 27 2018, @08:46PM (1 child)

    by requerdanos (5997) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday February 27 2018, @08:46PM (#644785) Journal

    It's like if you've got 4GB of memory in your physical computer, you cannot run a virtual machine with 4GB of memory on that machine that emulates that physical computer.

    Depends upon:
    1. How compressible the data in the memory tend to be (unallocated memory, for example, compresses away to nothing + a memory map), and
    2. How well the virtual machine uses data compression in managing that virtual memory in the virtual machine.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 27 2018, @09:07PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 27 2018, @09:07PM (#644801)

    i dunno man. my body cells contain my dna which is enough to recreate me if implanted in an egg cell (which could even be my own) thus creating a clone.

    now that future cannot be predicted as to how it behaves, but we can get a pretty good idea by my past. its experiences may differ and the outcome will, but there'd be measurable differences

    so it could be that the universe can be described fully as a topology via information contained in just part of the universe, in much the same way that all life as we know it can be thus explained via a small part of it. We cannot know what it knows without further query, but we can determine the outline and what it contains--maybe even predict some of the behavior from now until the end of its run.