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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/


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  • (Score: 2) by requerdanos on Wednesday February 28 2018, @01:10AM

    by requerdanos (5997) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday February 28 2018, @01:10AM (#644903) Journal

    Why?

    The deliberate misuse, by implication, changed the statement "Here is something interesting about science" into "here is something interesting about science, and by the way did I mention my political views about sex roles in society and my desire to misuse language in order to keep bringing them up, like a vegan tells you what she eats, or the man without a TV tells you that she never watches TV."

    the usage of 'she' (or 'he' rather than 'they') as a pronoun in this case signifies the singular rather than the plural. Since that was (pretty obviously) the intent, and that intent was satisflied, what difference does it make?

    Setting up number (singular vs. plural) as a strawman may sound really relevant, but it isn't; number never seems to have been at issue. If you need to have it explained to you that deliberate misuse of pronouns is distracting, then the explanation might not help you.

    Language is defined by usage, not the other way around.

    Well, this is true in the final analysis, but let's look at how that works.

    At a given time (say, now), the language has a set of conventions. If you want to change them, you have to break them.

    If a billion people do things in manner "a", and you do them in manner "b", then you are wrong, and wrong by an enormous ratio, because "Language is defined by usage."

    If you get a million people to do it wrong with you, then all of you are only about 90% wrong, again, because "Language is defined by usage."

    Eventually, you can tip the scales, and if you get enough screwups on board, you can redefine what's "correct" by usage.

    This is why dictionaries now tell us that literally means figuratively, infer means imply, and for all I know, up is down. There are enough people bad at language to break it, because "Language is defined by usage."

    The pronoun-hijack people are not even misusing language out of ignorance--in general, they know the right way, and are deliberately doing "language" wrong to co-opt it to undermine opposing political causes and ever-so-slightly appear to strengthen their own. Because of this, I hope they, collectively, come to the linguistic equivalent of getting hit by a bus--even if I otherwise support their cause and encourage them.

    if one unambiguously communicates the idea(s) one wishes to communicate, then the chosen phraseology has done its job.

    Yes, it has done it well, done it poorly, done it excellently, done it in a barely recognizable manner, has done it according to almost innumerable values of "has done its job."

    It is possibly to do a job well or poorly, and still have done the job. A job poorly done is still poorly done.

    Were you confused as to the meaning/intent of the author? If the answer is 'no', then why do you care?

    Again, for someone who would need to ask this question, under the premise that they were more than adequately enlightened by admittedly poor phraseology, further enlightenment probably won't be helpful nor appreciated. Perhaps just know that "some people can tell the difference and it bugs them."

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