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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: 2) by fyngyrz on Wednesday February 28 2018, @02:19PM
It seems to me that there is a world of difference between trivialities and encouraging the devolution of language, particularly as it relates to edited or curated material.
Certainly we can allow language to devolve from the top down, where edited material is carelessly or incompetently managed. But I have never seen a reasonable argument as to why we should — if we know better.
If I'm going to write for others, I intend to offer them the courtesy of trying to do it well. I know for a fact that for the sophisticated reader, it is considerably more pleasant to read well-written prose than it is to be stabbed in the eye by trivially avoidable errors. The better educated they are, the more likely this is to be the case.
Finally, when one writes incompetently, particularly when it is really obvious, some readers are going to take that as an indication of (lack of) quality of the writer's thought processes. That does the actual content and intent of the writing no favors at all.