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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/
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 27 2018, @10:11PM (2 children)
For those of you not familiar with the Mandela Effect, look it up. It is real and is having real consequences. They go into the past to change something and all your life goes upside down. Look into it and then make a decision. I know it to be real.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Wednesday February 28 2018, @03:21AM
If you assume that your ideas will have so little credibility that you feel have to start out with telling people that they are real and not imaginary, you may not have the evidence to back up your claims that you feel that you do.
A small change in confidence might result in something like "the Mandela Effect, look it up. Its ability to (do whatever it does) is startling and undeniable; you will be (fascinated/interested/at least not totally disinterested). (Bonus: The data show that...)"
I know that elsewhere in this discussion there is some disagreement over pronouns, but here, specifically, you use a pronoun without apparent antecedent, "they." Perhaps explain to whom you're referring with that?
Also, in performing some research as you requested, I learned that many people can't properly spell the names of fictional characters, and assert confidently that their being wrong is actually being right. However, the Internet is full of people who don't know what they are talking about and will confidently, adamantly tell you that their brand of wrong is totally right.
I did learn that there is a significant number of people who believe that someone who is confidently wrong *must* be right (perhaps because they feel confident?), but must also have migrated here from a parallel universe, Occam's razor notwithstanding. So thanks for that.
(Score: 1) by ACE209 on Wednesday February 28 2018, @01:32PM
The effect can seem real - because our memory is not as reliable as a digital storage medium.