Climbing the Hill; a few words on Hawking and Black Holes; the pledge drive continues.

View 810 Tuesday, February 11, 2014

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

 

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

If a foreign government had imposed this system of education on the United States, we would rightfully consider it an act of war.

Glenn T. Seaborg, National Commission on Education, 1983

 

Christians to Beirut. Alawites to the grave.

Syrian Freedom Fighters

 

This will be short. Larry Niven and Steve Barnes came over with a new friend, Evie King, and we hiked to the top of the hill, about 4 miles and 700 feet height. Obviously I survived. Mark, my long time heart specialist friend, has recently advised me to stop favoring this malaise and get myself up to the top of that hill. He was right. I am exhausted but I feel better than I have in weeks.

When you get older, you slow down. That’s not good, and it’s not something you want to encourage; at least that is my experience. It’s easy enough to convince yourself that you ought to take it easy, but that is not a good strategy. Push yourself to your present limit, and then a bit further next time, and keep that up. The result is good. I noticed that when we came down and went to lunch: we had a great conversation, and I was participating like my old self, even though I was physically exhausted, and I’ll probably have to take it easier tomorrow: but that’s all right, because, alas, Sable isn’t able to go on such long hikes any longer because of her cancerous leg. She hates that and wants to walk a lot, but then the leg gets painful and she has to come home; so tomorrow I’ll take Sable to her limit and I suspect that will be a good comedown for me. But I am no longer going to avoid going up my hell.

There are crows up there, apparently having escaped the general die off from West Nile that reduced our local flock (I know it’s a murder of crows, but that particular collective doesn’t much appeal to me) from two groups of 50 or so each to a single pair here in the Studio City triangle. I saw at least 6 up on the hill, as well as at least one red tail hawk. With luck our bird population will recover.

And I *STILL* say…

Jerry, when I first read your discussion of your afternoon of Lovecraftian horror with (as I recall) Niven and Forward, at the nearly-immobile hands of Dr. Stephen Hawking (“The Breakdown of Physics Physicists in the Vicinity of a Singularity”, or some such) I remarked to myself that this had all of the flavor and texture of an indirect proof.

I’m sure you recall the technique. You assume that the thing to be proved is false, and you work from there to an obvious contradiction, thus showing that your initial assumption was itself false.

The latest commentary, on the existence and/or nonexistence of black holes and/or event horizons, serves only to reinforce that perception.

The latest version seems to say that Cthulhu could not only pop out of the black hole, but he could pop out of the black hole and into the “normal” universe at ANY point in the normal universe. It also seems to say that something that is at ANY point in the normal universe could suddenly, without warning, find itself engulfed by the black hole. Yes, of course the probability is inversely proportional to the distance from the center of mass of the hole, but it ain’t zero…

The bloody thing seems to me to be SCREAMING at us that one of the fundamental assumptions going into the discussion is false.

–John R. Strohm

I share your conclusion, but then I have always thought that we went wrong somewhere. When you have to invent dark matter and dark energy as the makeup of most of the universe – something you cannot detect – it seems to me that you have gone far away from scientific methods as I learned it.

Dick Feynman never insisted that his QED in which everything that could happen did but most of that cancelled out in probability counts, he knew this, and often said so; but it did account for real observations, and did so with remarkable accuracy.

I don’t think we have anything quite like that for black holes. And yes, I did write in a Lovecraftian Vein about my experience at a Stephen Hawing lecture at Cal Tech three decades ago. It’s in my Step Farther Out, and was originally in a Galaxy SF magazine column. There is an interesting discussion of black hole radiation at http://folk.uio.no/thomas/po/consciousness-without-biology.html although it’s not enormously flattering to me; still it does show that I thought about all this a long time ago.

I think there is something fundamentally wrong with our assumptions about the structure of the universe, but I fear I can’t say what it is. It just seems wrong to me that we keep creating new particles to explain why the old ones don’t work the way they should, and we keep having to postulate dark matter and dark energy to explain the observations. At some point things just get too complex; but we also must keep in mind that the Standard Theory does explain a hell of a lot more than we thought we knew in 1950.

But like Mr. Strohm, I can’t quite escape the feeling that there’s something simple we have overlooked, an assumption that just isn’t true.

I remind you that this is pledge week at Chaos Manor, and if you have not renewed your subscription in a while, this would be a good time to do it; and if you have never subscribed, you should do so. It’s all explained at Paying For This Place, http://www.jerrypournelle.com/paying.html, and it’s easy enough to do. I don’t harangue you about this often, and I leave the timing of when I do to KUSC, the Los Angeles Classical Music Station, since this place operates on the Public Radio model – it’s free, but if we don’t get enough subscriptions it will go away. I want to thank all those who renewed today, and the new subscribers; if we can keep that rate up all will be well.

For those who haven’t noticed, you can find at http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/view.html links to View from long ago, and at http://www.jerrypournelle.com/mail/mail.html a similar list links to mail. Some of it is quite significant; I content that for years I had the best mail column on the web. The new format required for this hosting has made it more difficult to keep that up, but we still get a lot of great mail; this is a very intelligent readership.

You will note that I don’t annoy you with advertising. That’s because enough of you have gone to http://www.jerrypournelle.com/paying.html and subscribed. Keep it up! And yes, I will annoy you with pledge drive for this week, but it stops after that.

Good night.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.