Tag: black holes

New Theory Suggests We’ve Been Wrong About Black Holes for 60 Years

How confusing inevitability with reality built decades of paradox.

What if general relativity never actually tells us that black holes already exist, but only that their formation is inevitable in an infinite future we can never observe? In a new theory, Daryl Janzen, a physicist at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada, questions whether we’ve mistaken mathematical inevitability for physical reality, and shows how much of our black hole story rests on that quiet leap.

Black holes are among the most captivating and scientifically intriguing phenomena in modern physics, inspiring both scientists and the public alike.

But do they really exist? What if they are only ever forming, never formed?

Just imagine — what if the whole edifice of black hole physics is built on an invalid logical inference that’s gone unnoticed (or unacknowledged?) for the better part of a century?

Inevitability is not actuality — that’s obvious enough. Yet for sixty years physicists have ignored relativity’s most basic rule, and we’ve taken for granted that the latter is implied by the former. Like fools walking around imagining we’re all dead because someday we’ll die, they look at the evidence that nothing can stop black holes from collapsing toward their horizons and imagine that a process which remains forever incomplete has already come to its end.

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Meet the man trying to send a warning about history’s worst tragedies back to 1935

For about a decade, Joe Davis has been trying to send a message into space. This message is not intended for potential intelligent alien listeners, though. He’s already sent two signals into the void for them. He hopes that this communiqué will reach humans. On Earth. Ideally around 1935.

The dispatch, which Davis calls Swansong, is at its simplest a one-hour Morse code transmission listing numerous pandemics, natural disasters, genocides, and other tragedies that humans failed to mitigate or prevent between 1935 and 2011. The idea is to send it towards Cygnus X-1, a black hole over 6,000 lightyears from Earth, in order to slingshot the signal off of its time-distorting edge, into the past, and back towards us. If the gambit works, the Swansong project could, as Davis put it in his notes for a 2017 presentation on the idea, “be used to break the wheel of time.”

It’s easy to brush Swansong off as an outlandish idea, especially when you know that Davis is not a trained scientist. He earned a BA in creative arts in 1973 from the now-defunct Mount Angel College in Oregon, then moved back to Mississippi, where he’d grown up, and started working blue collar jobs, usually with machines. (He reportedly used his art and machine skills to design his own prosthetic after losing a leg.) In recent decades, he’s struggled to make ends meet as an artist, taking dishwashing gigs to help cover basic expenses — and occasionally failing to do so, facing eviction, and sleeping on friends’ couches or in his truck for days or weeks on end.

But Davis’s lack of credentials and material success do not reflect his intellectual capabilities. As an undergrad in the early 70’s, he reportedly got permission from notorious innovation hub Bell Laboratories to use their laser rigs to carve acrylic, glass, and plastic, publishing his techniques in an academic journal. Then, while working as a laborer, he drew up designs for an electron gun that NASA agreed to launch on its space shuttle to conduct an experiment that could have theoretically produced artificial northern lights. (Despite the agreement, theproject, dubbed Ruby Falls, never got off the ground due to a NASA budget shortfall.) And in 1982, he talked his way into a meeting with the head of MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies, outlined his Ruby Falls plan and several other ideas, and walked out a research fellow. He’s been affiliated with MIT ever since.

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