Possible Hole in Black Holes 495
jd writes "Researchers have found what they believe may be a MECO (Magnetic, Eternally Collapsing Object) inside of a quasar. MECOs are rivals to black hole theory and involve plasmas that never reach the state of being a singularity. The most obvious differences between them are that MECOs have a magnetic field and do not have an event horizon. The problem lies in that the Universe cannot have both MECOs and black holes — it can only have one or the other. If this object truly is a MECO, then black holes do not exist. Anywhere. (Furthermore, this would require Professor Hawking to return a year's subscription to Private Eye and give Professor Thorne a year's subscription to Penthouse.) On the other hand, if this thing isn't a MECO, it's behaving very very oddly for a black hole."
Why... (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, if this thing really is an MECO then what are all of the things that we've thought were black holes?
Unless... (Score:4, Insightful)
Slashdot experts (Score:5, Insightful)
"But Chris Reynolds of the University of Maryland, in Baltimore, US, says the evidence for a MECO inside this quasar is not convincing."
Apparently the experts are not conviced about this "interesting" observation but at slashdot the expert will come to a final conclusion. How many slashdot posters actualy are qualified to talk about these subjects?
Re:Unless... (Score:3, Insightful)
And as these are both theoretical objects, there's no reason to assume they both exist.
Vague data + wild supposition = NEWS FLASH! (Score:5, Insightful)
Cosmology isn't my field but the data here is incredibly vague. I'm not sure this deserves more than a raised eyebrow and an "Okay...now come up with something a little less tenuous". Interpretation of data is an art in itself and can be wildly skewed by the observer's own opinions - show mw that this hasn't happened here.
let's side with caution for now (Score:5, Insightful)
Until further obervations is being done and it is being confirmed it's truelly a MECO (or other MECOs are observed), then we really can't get say anything beyond wild speculation (which is what slashdot is very good at
Most probably, it will turn out to be not a true MECO, but rather an odd variant of a black hole.
If it DOES turn out to be a MECO, then, as theory predicts, there can't be any black holes - so then all our past obsrvations must have been wrong or misinterpreted. And if it turns out we have MECO's AND blak holes...well, then something very, very, very wrong must be going on with our current understanding of the universe and all the theories thusfar.
Which, actually, would be a fantastic thing to science, contrary to what some might believe.
The third option (Score:5, Insightful)
The option is that neither of these theories are correct or rather neither is entirely correct. Both may still be partially true, and probably both are to a certain extent.
Newton was right on with his theories, yet they were proven to be incorrect, and they are still the first thing a physics student learns today. I find the idea of "if phenomina A exists then phenomina B, that we have also have some evidence for, cannot exist" because when you get right down to it we don't understand our universe we perceive it.
Re:Slashdot experts (Score:4, Insightful)
"Mere lack of doubt does not imply understanding"
( "Uji", paragraph #2, in: Shôbogenzô )
Re:Unless... (Score:2, Insightful)
alternatively, mayby there are different cars, and different buildings.
You can have multiple outcomes of such a large event, depending on different starting conditions (weight of car and building material for the above analogy)
As we don't have a grand unified theory yet, we'll keep adjusting our disparate theories as we see new things.
I love science me, except the bits that hurt...
Re:Slashdot experts (Score:4, Insightful)
Unless, of course, what you talk about counts as hate speech. Then you may speak of it, but only if you accept that you could be prosecuted legally--you do not, in Canada, have the right to say whatever you want, whenever you want.
Speaking only about Canadian rights here, the rest of you understand.
The bet is the other way around (Score:3, Insightful)
Hawkins called the bet an insurance policy so he would not be empty handed if black holes did not exist after all...
Re:Why... (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean, if all of a sudden my very smart next door neighbor told me the sky was purple, I'd have to give his account much more scruteny than normal, simply because I already have so much evidence that it's blue. I certaintly wouldn't elevate it much past "interesting" until I got a lot more information, and I'd certainly not discard blue until there was a great body of evidence.
TW
Re:Occam's Razor (Score:5, Insightful)
One problem... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Dangerous (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why... (Score:1, Insightful)
1. EVERYONE knows the earth is flat. Science says so, my priest says so, the really smart guy next door says so. No need to listen to this kook who says the earth is round.
2. EVERYONE knows the sun revolves around the earth. It is plainly observable to any seeing person on any given day. It is reproducible - just watch it again tomorrow. Clearly irrefutable scientific proof. Ignore the one kook who says the earth revolves around the sun.
Re:Why... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Unless... (Score:5, Insightful)
Blah blah blah. By that standard, no scientist in any field can "prove" anything -- you can't prove that it is not the case that the Universe was created five minutes ago by a deity that's having fun with his creations making them think that it's anywhere between six thousand and several billion years old; you can't prove that it is not the case that our eyes are completely deceiving us and the air is actually filled with floating jellyfish that want to eat our brains; you can't prove that it is not the case that "bacteria" and "viruses" are actually a clever Freemason conspiracy to hide from the rest of the world the truth that disease is caused by an imbalance of bodily humors
Re:Slashdot experts (Score:5, Insightful)
Please give the name, and date of execution, of the last person executed by gas chamber (or any other means) in the Federal Republic of Germany for having "Nazi-like beliefs."
Today, questioning thoughts about human evolution or global warming are practically considered hate speech.
No, the "questioning thoughts" are not hateful; they are, however, universally incoherent and contradictory with the data. What's hateful is that they are then picked up by political partisans and used in an attempt to control policy.
Re:Errr (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Why... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why... (Score:3, Insightful)
When the matter gets compressed to the point where one of these should form, one of two things should happen:
The idea is that these are mutually exclusive.
The compressed matter will either form a MECO or Black hole. Only one thing should happen.
I don't study these sort of things, but that is my layman's understanding.
Re:Why... (Score:5, Insightful)
Because the two are mutually exclusive.
Black Holes are (or have, depending on how pedantic you want to be) singularities--that is their defining characteristic. No one has ever "seen" a singularity. What we see is indirect evidence for objects that are compact and too massive to be neutron stars. The theoretical upper limits on neutron star masses is quite strong, so we do not believe they are neutron stars.
When a fairly massive star collapses, it stops when the density gets high enough that repulsive core of the strong force dominates gravity. When a really massive object collapses, the strong force is not strong enough, and the collapse goes on unimpeded, which creates a defect in our coordinate system known as an event horizon.
The thing is, if there is something that could interfere with the collapse, then the collapse would not occur. Apparently MECO theory includs something that will do this. I have no idea if it is right or not, but if it is it provides a generic mechanism that will operate in all collapsed objects, so none of them will ever get to the singularity stage.
Proofs that Black Holes exist have always been a matter of elimination--it isn't a duck or a neutron star, ergo it must be a Black Hole. If there is another viable alternative, the proof goes by the wayside until more information is discovered.
The truth is somewhere in the middle (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem that the grandparent pointed out is very real. While we need to assume that "the state of current knowledge" is sound and trustworthy to do any engineering it is fatal to make that assumption in science.
I had a friend who made a minor discovery while in undergrad, simply because he didn't fudge his data in a lab assignment. He got graded down for it, and decided to redo the experiment. When he got the same results, he started asking around and found out that quite a few of his classmates had also gotten the results he had, but written it off to "experimental error" since it didn't match the predicted outcome. He took this back to the professor, and challenged him to actually do the assignment himself. They wound up publishing a joint paper on it, but to me the most interesting realization was that, for all the years that assignment had been given, nobody else had caught the error in the accepted theory.
By all means, if you have to bet on the outcome of any particular situation, go with the current state of knowledge. But if you're asked if our current knowledge is correct in its entirety, bet heavily that it is not. And if observation doesn't match the theory, don't lock yourself into the assumption that the data must be wrong because the theory couldn't possible be.
--MarkusQ
An amateur question involving singularities . . . (Score:2, Insightful)
I've been wondering about that for some number of years now - but the fact that cosmologists have generally accepted the existence of singularities as all but proven fact and have even had many observations which supported this belief has always prevented me from thinking too hard about it (after all, why pit my amateur understanding of cosmology and relativity against that of experts?).
If this assertion proves to be tenable, what effect will it have on collateral theories in cosmology (for example, estimates on the total mass of the Universe, which in turn affects our understanding of whether or not space is curved and if so, positively or negatively)? Much of our current understanding of the cosmos is based directly on the correctness of the Theory of Relativity, but this finding (if confirmed) would appear to falsify at least some of relativity's conclusions. Does this tenative finding square with string theory? How much of Einstein's Theory of General Relativity will need to be updated to accomodate these findings?
Then again, the New Scientist isn't exactly the most unimpeachable scientific news source. Perhaps I won't trash Al's most famous (and best supported) theory just yet.
Re:Why... (Score:4, Insightful)
The maths our current model is based upon says they're mutually exclusive.
If we have observed an object that isn't a duck or a neutron star, or a meco, then it might still be a black hole and our current model may be incomplete.
i.e. if we prove observationally that mecos and black holes do exist, then that means our models/assumptions are wrong. or that what were observing is neither a meco nor a black hole but something else again...
Where d'ya get that from? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The truth is somewhere in the middle (Score:3, Insightful)
I had a friend who made a minor discovery while in undergrad, simply because he didn't fudge his data in a lab assignment. He got graded down for it, and decided to redo the experiment. When he got the same results, he started asking around and found out that quite a few of his classmates had also gotten the results he had, but written it off to "experimental error" since it didn't match the predicted outcome. He took this back to the professor, and challenged him to actually do the assignment himself. They wound up publishing a joint paper on it, but to me the most interesting realization was that, for all the years that assignment had been given, nobody else had caught the error in the accepted theory.
By all means, if you have to bet on the outcome of any particular situation, go with the current state of knowledge. But if you're asked if our current knowledge is correct in its entirety, bet heavily that it is not. And if observation doesn't match the theory, don't lock yourself into the assumption that the data must be wrong because the theory couldn't possible be.
I think that your usage of the phrase, 'correct in its entirety', though, guarantees the outcome of the argument you are looking for. Of course it's impossible to be 'correct in its entirety' - experimental error, limitations in resolution, and even quantum randomness means that you can not make a perfectly true statement. But just because that is the case does NOT mean knowledge is not advancing and approaching the Truth.
For example (and I freely admit I lift this example from Issac Asimov), the flat earth theory. We poo-poo it, laugh at it, wonder about the silly primitive people who beilived it.... but it is not a bad theory. Put it this way. The flat earth theory posits that the earth has a curvature of 0 inches per mile lateral. The reality is that the earth curves 8 inches per mile lateral. An error of 8 inches per mile in your theory is not too bad, really, and until a large number of humans were regularly travelling far enough where those 8 inches per mile began to add up and make the maps and timekeeping go funny, it would have gone unnoticed.
Okay, now you figured out the earth is a sphere. Great! Except here comes Newton, with his F=ma and F=Gm1m2/r^2 stuff... and he predicts that the earth is NOT sperical... it's really an oblate spheroid, due to it's rotation, and so the curvature is not 8 inches per mile ALWAYS (as it would be on a true sphere), but varies from 7.998 to 8.002 inches per mile depending whether you are going around the equator or the poles when measuring.... Does this make the spherical earth theory silly, outmoded, wrong? Of course not. It merely points out that it can be REFINED.
So, I guess that's what I'm trying to get at. The state of current knowledge has soundness and trustworthiness in science, as well as enigneering. After all, it has to fit with all the current observations or it would not be considered an adequate, sound, trustworthy theory of nature! You can always say, "well, you haven't done every possible experiment" - this is trivially true - and what allows science to be USEFUL is that it makes predictions of what will happen BEYOND just regurgiating the results of experiments - but of course, since these predicitions have not, a priori, been tested, we really don't know what will happen until we try, as your friend discovered! The price of making science useful is eternal uncertainty as to what happens when you "stretch" it a bit. I suspect I am agreeing with you more than disagreeing, but I felt the point was important to make.