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The Electric Universe Theory

Hydrogen River Between Galaxies Breaks the Rules | Space News
TEXT: "Published on Feb 28, 2014: Scientists using the Green Bank Telescope have observed what they describe as a river of neutral hydrogen streaming into the Galaxy NGC 6946. The researchers conclude that this tenuous filament of gas is providing the necessary fuel for the high rate of star formation in the spiral galaxy."
 
IBEX—Plasma Ribbon Confirms Electric Sun | Space News
TEXT: "Published on Feb 21, 2014: NASA's IBEX and Voyager 1 missions have shattered all conventional ideas about the heliospheric boundary, the region separating our solar system from interstellar space. In 2009, the IBEX spacecraft created the first all-sky map of the boundary revealing an astonishing ribbon of energetic neutral atoms. According to scientists, it's still a big mystery."
 
Hope I am not duplicating - with this one I think I may be - but all good. Good stuff. I'm on a roll today. :)

Comment: "More Truth... It's All There... Just Look... It's All Birkeland... 1902. We All Knew!" :cool:

And there is: "Tesla...Tesla....Tesla!" :)

Some great archival science film footage in the below video -

Evidence of the Electromagnetic Sun - Earth Connection | Space News
TEXT: "Published on Jul 12, 2015: At the recent Thunderbolts Project EU2015 Conference: Paths of Discovery, Dr. Donald Scott presented new groundbreaking evidence of the electromagnetic connection between the Earth and the Sun. The electric universe theory states that the sun is in essence an electrical discharge phenomenon, powered by electric currents flowing along the arm of the galaxy. Electrical circuitry connects the Sun and all planets, including the Earth, driving climate, weather, and Earth’s auroras. The telltale sign of Birkeland currents at the poles of planets is counter rotational motions in atmospheric phenomena. In this Space News, Dr. Scott discusses the new, visual evidence that Birkeland currents from the Sun are the cause of Earth’s auroras."
 
Probably another repeat. Still good to be reminded.

Mysterious Electric Mercury | Space News

TEXT: "Published on Jun 27, 2015"
 
Demonstrations/Experiments by Billy Yevelton. The 'bulls-eye craters' (that so perplex scientists) created in the laboratory here are exact replicas of what we see on earth and other planets and moons.

Electric Discharge and Surface Formation

TEXT: "Published on Mar 31, 2014"
 
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Breathtaking demonstrations of the power to form - done by Billy Yevelton.

Surface Formation Part 2

TEXT: "Published on Mar 31, 2014"
 
Electrical Planetary Scarring in the Lab | Space News
TEXT: "Published on Jun 5, 2015: When one gazes at our celestial neighborhood, the planets, moons, comets and asteroids we see defy the speculative history we learned in school. These bodies testify to events not included in any geology textbook. The evidence seem undeniable -- high-energy electromagnetic events have indelibly scarred, and in some cases devastated the rocky bodies in our solar system. Today, this seemingly outrageous theory is being put to the test experimentally. One of the most remarkable of these experimentalists is Billy Yelverton, who has successfully replicated countless planetary features through experiments with electrical discharges and electric fields. Today, we provide a brief overview and introduction of Billy’s research.

"The ideas expressed in videos presented on the Thunderbolts YouTube Channel do not necessarily express the views of T-Bolts Group Inc or The Thunderbolts Project(TM)."
 
Space News | The Sun -- It's too Round!
TEXT: "Published on Sep 1, 2012: Yet another "mystery" surrounding the Sun: scientists working with the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) have observed that the Sun is far too perfectly round. Centrifugal forces in a rotating ball of gas should make the Sun wider at its equator than along its axis -- that's the requirement of the standard model.

"From the Electric Universe perspective, since gravity is insufficient to overcome centrifugal forces on the Sun, the ability of electromagnetic forces to confine plasma must now be considered."

The story upon which the above video is based:
Sun's almost perfectly round shape baffles scientists
LINK:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/08/120816150801.htm
TEXT: "Date: August 16, 2012
Source: University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy
Summary: The sun is nearly the roundest object ever measured. If scaled to the size of a beach ball, it would be so round that the difference between the widest and narrow diameters would be much less than the width of a human hair.

The sun is nearly the roundest object ever measured. If scaled to the size of a beach ball, it would be so round that the difference between the widest and narrow diameters would be much less than the width of a human hair.

The sun rotates every 28 days, and because it doesn't have a solid surface, it should be slightly flattened. This tiny flattening has been studied with many instruments for almost 50 years to learn about the sun's rotation, especially the rotation below its surface, which we can't see directly.

Now Jeff Kuhn and Isabelle Scholl (Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawaii at Manoa), Rock Bush (Stanford University), and Marcelo Emilio (Universidade Estadual de Ponta Grossa, Brazil) have used the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI) onboard the Solar Dynamics Observatory satellite to obtain what they believe is the definitive -- and baffling -- answer.

Because there is no atmosphere in space to distort the solar image, they were able to use HMI's exquisite image sensitivity to measure the solar shape with unprecedented accuracy. The results indicate that if the Sun were shrunk to a ball one meter in diameter, its equatorial diameter would be only 17 millionths of a meter larger than the diameter through its North-South pole, which is its rotation axis.

They also found that the solar flattening is remarkably constant over time and too small to agree with that predicted from its surface rotation. This suggests that other subsurface forces, like solar magnetism or turbulence, may be a more powerful influence than expected.

Kuhn, the team leader and first author of an article published Aug. 16 in Science Express, said, "For years we've believed our fluctuating measurements were telling us that the sun varies, but these new results say something different. While just about everything else in the sun changes along with its 11-year sunspot cycle, the shape doesn't."

This work was supported by NASA grants to Stanford University and the University of Hawaii."
 
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Everything is connected. :) Fourth Phase of Water - we are also dealing with positive and negative charges. The world is electric, and where there is electricity, there is magnetism. And where we have magnetism, we have a 'battery ' with light as the energy source. We 'photosynthesize' at least at the first stage, which is 100% efficient.

LINK: The Thunderbolts Project Podcast
Episode Info: #014 Dr. Jerry Pollack: The 4th Phase of Water | Electric Universe Podcast
Dr. Jerry Pollack is a University of Washington professor of bioengineering, where he researches crystalline, or "structured" water. This little known phase of H20 plays some important roles in biology, including a process in humans that seems to be similar to the photosynthesis we see in plants.
 
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Regarding the nature of the sun.....

The Thunderbolts Project Podcast: #013 Monty Childs: SAFIRE Project | Electric Universe Universe Podcast
LINK: #013 Monty Childs: SAFIRE Project | Electric Universe Conference 2013 Off-Stage from The Thunderbolts Project Podcast
TEXT: "Episode Info - Monty Childs is an engineer working to answer one of the questions that we here at The Thunderbolts Project believe is central to our understanding of the universe - what is the true nature of our sun? To do so, he has initiated SAFIRE, a project readying for construction, in which Monty and his team will build a scale model of an electric sun and test for the non-nuclear effects that we see in our scientific observations of the closest star. In this talk with host Matthew David, Monty fills us in on all of the experiment's details and gives an update on its current status."
 
Astronomers peer inside stars, finding giant magnets - October 22, 2015
LINK: http://phys.org/news/2015-10-astronomers-peer-stars-giant-magnets.html
TEXT: "Astronomers have for the first time probed the magnetic fields in the mysterious inner regions of stars, finding they are strongly magnetized. Using a technique called asteroseismology, the scientists were able to calculate the magnetic field strengths in the fusion-powered hearts of dozens of red giants, stars that are evolved versions of our sun. "In the same way medical ultrasound uses sound waves to image the interior of the human body, asteroseismology uses sound waves generated by turbulence on the surface of stars to probe their inner properties," says Caltech postdoctoral researcher Jim Fuller, who co-led a new study detailing the research.

"The findings, published in the October 23 issue of Science, will help astronomers better understand the life and death of stars. Magnetic fields likely determine the interior rotation rates of stars; such rates have dramatic effects on how the stars evolve. Until now, astronomers have been able to study the magnetic fields of stars only on their surfaces, and have had to use supercomputer models to simulate the fields near the cores, where the nuclear-fusion process takes place. "We still don't know what the center of our own sun looks like," Fuller says.

"Red giants have a different physical makeup from so-called main-sequence stars such as our sun—one that makes them ideal for asteroseismology (a field that was born at Caltech in 1962, when the late physicist and astronomer Robert Leighton discovered the solar oscillations using the solar telescopes at Mount Wilson). The cores of red-giant stars are much denser than those of younger stars. As a consequence, sound waves do not reflect off the cores, as they do in stars like our sun. Instead, the sound waves are transformed into another class of waves, called gravity waves. "It turns out the gravity waves that we see in the red giants do propagate all the way to the center of these stars," says co-lead author Matteo Cantiello, a specialist in stellar astrophysics from UC Santa Barbara's Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP).

"This conversion from sound waves to gravity waves has major consequences for the tiny shape changes, or oscillations, that red giants undergo. "Depending on their size and internal structure, stars oscillate in different patterns," Fuller says. In one form of oscillation pattern, known as the dipole mode, one hemisphere of the star becomes brighter while the other becomes dimmer. Astronomers observe these oscillations in a star by measuring how its light varies over time.

"When strong magnetic fields are present in a star's core, the fields can disrupt the propagation of gravity waves, causing some of the waves to lose energy and become trapped within the core. Fuller and his coauthors have coined the term "magnetic greenhouse effect" to describe this phenomenon because it works similarly to the greenhouse effect on Earth, in which greenhouse gases in the atmosphere help trap heat from the sun. The trapping of gravity waves inside a red giant causes some of the energy of the star's oscillation to be lost, and the result is a smaller than expected dipole mode.

"In 2013, NASA's Kepler space telescope, which can measure stellar brightness variations with incredibly high precision, detected dipole-mode damping in several red giants. Dennis Stello, an astronomer at the University of Sydney, brought the Kepler data to the attention of Fuller and Cantiello. Working in collaboration with KITP director Lars Bildsten and Rafael Garcia of France's Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission, the scientists showed that the magnetic greenhouse effect was the most likely explanation for dipole-mode damping in the red giants. Their calculations revealed that the internal magnetic fields of the red giants were as much as 10 million times stronger than Earth's magnetic field. "This is exciting, as internal magnetic fields play an important role for the evolution and ultimate fate of stars," says Professor of Theoretical Astrophysics Sterl Phinney, Caltech's executive officer for astronomy, who was not involved in the study.

"A better understanding of the interior magnetic fields of stars could also help settle a debate about the origin of powerful magnetic fields on the surfaces of certain neutron stars and white dwarfs, two classes of stellar corpses that form when stars die. "The magnetic fields that they find in the red-giant cores are comparable to those of the strongly magnetized white dwarfs," Phinney says. "The fact that only some of the red giants show the dipole suppression, which indicates strong core fields, may well be related to why only some stars leave behind remnants with strong magnetic fields after they die."

"The asteroseismology technique the team used to probe red giants probably will not work with our sun. "However," Fuller says, "stellar oscillations are our best probe of the interiors of stars, so more surprises are likely." The paper is entitled "Asteroseismology Can Reveal Strong Internal Magnetic Fields in Red Giant Stars." "
 
SAFIRE project – Electric Sun investigated - June 5, 2015
LINK: SAFIRE project – Electric Sun hypothesis investigated

TEXT: [Full Text Follows Given Without Quotation Marks] The Electric Sun hypothesis is being investigated by a team including the Thunderbolts team in the SAFIRE project. SAFIRE project (Stellar Atmospheric Function In Regulation Experiment) and SAFIRE team links, videos and articles will be listed below as they appear.

The summary of the aims of the SAFIRE project are to:
"The SAFIRE Project is an experimental investigation of electric discharge behavior of an anode (positively charged electrode) in a vacuum chamber, with special attention to correlations between such discharge behavior and “anomalous” features of the Sun."

It seems that the SAFIRE project will actually be testing to see if one of the Anode Sun model and the Cathode Sun model is more correct, or, if both are wrong then it is either a different electric sun model or the sun is not electric and perhaps it is not an Electric Universe.

SAFIRE project members include Dr James Ryder, Montgomery Childs (Monty Childs), Wallace Thornhill (Wal Thornhill), Dr Paul Anderson, Dr Don Scott (Donald E Scott), Dr Michael Clarage, Jan Onderco and Dr Lowell Morgan.

ELECTRIC SUN AND THE SAFIRE PROJECT
Below is the very short trailer for the SAFIRE project documentary video on youtube.

SAFIRE—The Documentary (trailer)
TEXT: "Published on May 24, 2015"


Trailer text:
In an Electric Universe the heavens are not an empty vacuum. Vast electrical currents stream across interstellar and intergalactic space. They draw matter into a spiral vortex to form a spiral galaxy. The galaxy is lit by the stars strung along the current streams – electric stars.

In an Electric Universe the Sun is a positively charged body in a negatively charged galactic environment. If such is truly the case then these features of the Sun are no longer riddles or anomalies. They are exactly as to what is to be expected. But the Electric Sun hypothesis has the same problem as the Thermonuclear hypothesis, we have never been able to test either in a laboratory. Until now …

More Electric Sun theory videos and articles based on the SAFIRE team and project.

SAFIRE: A Real-World Test of the Electric Sun (Part 1) | EU2013
TEXT: "Published on Jan 26, 2013"

SAFIRE: A Real-World Test of the Electric Sun (Part 2) } EU2013
TEXT: "Published on Jan 27, 2013"

Space News | The SAFIRE Project:Testing the Electric Sun
TEXT: "
Published on Sep 23, 2012: Outside of the earth, the Sun is the most heavily studied body in the solar system. Yet almost all of the Sun's features present major quandaries for solar physicists. But now, an expert on "Design of Experiment" methodologies, Monty Childs, is heading up a project to demonstrate how an electrified plasma environment can produce the enigmatic features of the Sun in the laboratory. Monty and his research group are confident that the technology is now available to rigorously test the electric Sun hypothesis."

SUN MYSTERIES
Some of our Suns puzzles and mysteries are listed below. Are they explained and expected by an Electric Sun and Electric Universe?
A list of Electric Sun articles on this site.

1) rapid acceleration of the solar wind away from the surface, up to millions of miles per hour; from an electrical vantage point such acceleration is the best indication of electric field strength;

2) more intense outbursts (coronal mass ejections) achieving speeds up to one quarter the speed of light—velocities plausibly achieved only in an electric field;

3) continued acceleration of the solar wind out past the inner planets, implying an extensive electric field acting on the particles long after they have departed the Sun;

4) a temperature minimum close to the Sun’s surface (approx. 5,000K, rising spectacularly through the chromosphere and into the corona, with outer corona temperatures up to 20 million degrees. (This, too, suggests an interfacial region—a plasma “double layer”—between the Sun and its extended plasma atmosphere);

5) “open” magnetic field lines, a violation of standard electromagnetic equations. This enigma disappears if the lines actually extend into the larger galactic domain as pathways of galactic currents flowing into the heliosphere. In such an arrangement, the lines close as required, but not within the heliosphere;

6) polar jets, a classical feature of electric discharge in plasma.

7) Equatorial torus, a feature well documented in Kristian Birkeland’s experiments with electrical bombardment of a magnetized sphere;

8) super-rotation of the equatorial atmosphere—35 rotations for every 26 rotations of the circumpolar atmosphere—a contradiction of standard atmospherics, but a predictable effect if the atmosphere is being driven by external, rotating cylindrical currents along the Sun’s axis, pinching down (plasma z-pinch) to meet the solar surface;

9) recent findings that the convection required to sustain the Sun’s magnetic field is not occurring. The full significance of this finding has yet to be studied.

THE SAFIRE PROJECT – INTERVIEW WITH MONTY CHILDS [I linked above, but here it is again.]

SAFIRE PROJECT LINKS:

International Science Foundation (ISF)
The Safire Project – Testing the Electric Sun (article on thunderbolts.info)
Safire Project site under construction – film (movie) to come?
SAFIRE Project discussion on the Thunderbolts.info forum
 
Researcher shows that black holes do not exist by Thania Benios September 24, 2014
LINK: http://phys.org/news/2014-09-black-holes.html
TEXT: "Black holes have long captured the public imagination and been the subject of popular culture, from Star Trek to Hollywood. They are the ultimate unknown – the blackest and most dense objects in the universe that do not even let light escape. And as if they weren't bizarre enough to begin with, now add this to the mix: they don't exist.

"By merging two seemingly conflicting theories, Laura Mersini-Houghton, a physics professor at UNC-Chapel Hill in the College of Arts and Sciences, has proven, mathematically, that black holes can never come into being in the first place. The work not only forces scientists to reimagine the fabric of space-time, but also rethink the origins of the universe. "I'm still not over the shock," said Mersini-Houghton. "We've been studying this problem for a more than 50 years and this solution gives us a lot to think about."

"For decades, black holes were thought to form when a massive star collapses under its own gravity to a single point in space – imagine the Earth being squished into a ball the size of a peanut – called a singularity. So the story went, an invisible membrane known as the event horizon surrounds the singularity and crossing this horizon means that you could never cross back. It's the point where a black hole's gravitational pull is so strong that nothing can escape it.

"The reason black holes are so bizarre is that it pits two fundamental theories of the universe against each other. Einstein's theory of gravity predicts the formation of black holes but a fundamental law of quantum theory states that no information from the universe can ever disappear. Efforts to combine these two theories lead to mathematical nonsense, and became known as the information loss paradox.

"In 1974, Stephen Hawking used quantum mechanics to show that black holes emit radiation. Since then, scientists have detected fingerprints in the cosmos that are consistent with this radiation, identifying an ever-increasing list of the universe's black holes. But now Mersini-Houghton describes an entirely new scenario. She and Hawking both agree that as a star collapses under its own gravity, it produces Hawking radiation. However, in her new work, Mersini-Houghton shows that by giving off this radiation, the star also sheds mass. So much so that as it shrinks it no longer has the density to become a black hole.

"Before a black hole can form, the dying star swells one last time and then explodes. A singularity never forms and neither does an event horizon. The take home message of her work is clear: there is no such thing as a black hole. The paper, which was recently submitted to ArXiv, an online repository of physics papers that is not peer-reviewed, offers exact numerical solutions to this problem and was done in collaboration with Harald Peiffer, an expert on numerical relativity at the University of Toronto. An earlier paper, by Mersini-Houghton, originally submitted to ArXiv in June, was published in the journal Physics Letters B, and offers approximate solutions to the problem.

"Experimental evidence may one day provide physical proof as to whether or not black holes exist in the universe. But for now, Mersini-Houghton says the mathematics are conclusive. Many physicists and astronomers believe that our universe originated from a singularity that began expanding with the Big Bang. However, if singularities do not exist, then physicists have to rethink their ideas of the Big Bang and whether it ever happened. "Physicists have been trying to merge these two theories – Einstein's theory of gravity and quantum mechanics – for decades, but this scenario brings these two theories together, into harmony," said Mersini-Houghton. "And that's a big deal." "
 
Theorists apply loop quantum gravity theory to black hole by Bob Yirka
May 31, 2013


LINK:
http://phys.org/news/2013-05-theorists-loop-quantum-gravity-theory.html
TEXT: "Physicists Rodolfo Gambini and Jorge Pullin of University of the Republic in Montevideo, Uruguay, and Louisiana State University respectively, have applied the theory of Loop Quantum Gravity (LQG) to a simplified black hole. In so doing, as they describe in their paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters, they suggest that instead of a singularity existing at its center, there is a portal to another universe.

"For many years theoretical physicists have believed that the universe came about as a result of a single Big Bang event—Einstein's theories suggested it was so. The problem with this line of thinking however, is that the theory of general relativity can't describe what came before the singularity, which should exist at the point in time just before the Big Bang. Theory also suggests that a similar singularity should exist at the center of black holes, but again, general relativity fails to describe them properly. Worse, there is the problem of the information loss paradox—if something falls into a black hole and is eventually squeezed to a singularity, what happens to the information it contained? Big Bang physicists can't say.

"To address these problems, Abhay Ashtekar and his team at Pennsylvania State University, back in 2006, came up with a theory known as loop quantum gravity. They suggested that instead of a singularity existing just before the Big Bang, there was the remains of a crunched down universe that had existed prior to the one that exists now. The universe didn't just Big Bang itself into existence from nothing, they said, instead there is an infinite loop where a universe shrinks down to a very tiny spot, then explodes in a Big Bang, then shrinks down again, over and over again forever—hence the use of the term "loop" in the theory. Since that time, some in the field have begun to refer to the theory as the Big Bounce, to replace the name Big Bang.

"In this new effort Gambini and Pullin applied LQG to a simplified model of a black hole. Their experiment showed that everything that was pulled into the black hole didn't compress to a singularity after all—instead it was compressed to a certain small size, then was spit out in another part of the universe or into another universe entirely.

"Because their model worked so well, the two suggest that it would likely work with real black holes as well. If this new theory is correct, they note, it would do away with the information loss paradox and open the door to the possibility of black holes being portals to other universes.

More information: Loop Quantization of the Schwarzschild Black Hole, Phys. Rev. Lett. 110, 211301 (2013) prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v110/i21/e211301

Abstract
We quantize spherically symmetric vacuum gravity without gauge fixing the diffeomorphism constraint. Through a rescaling, we make the algebra of Hamiltonian constraints Abelian, and therefore the constraint algebra is a true Lie algebra. This allows the completion of the Dirac quantization procedure using loop quantum gravity techniques. We can construct explicitly the exact solutions of the physical Hilbert space annihilated by all constraints. New observables living in the bulk appear at the quantum level (analogous to spin in quantum mechanics) that are not present at the classical level and are associated with the discrete nature of the spin network states of loop quantum gravity. The resulting quantum space-times resolve the singularity present in the classical theory inside black holes.

via Synopsis

Journal reference: Physical Review Letters
 
Revised theory of gravity doesn't predict a Big Bang By Lisa Zyga July 12, 2010

LINK:
http://phys.org/news/2010-07-theory-gravity-doesnt-big.html
TEXT: "The Big Bang theory has formed the basis of our understanding of the universe's origins since it was first proposed in 1927 by Georges Lemaitre. And for good reason: the theory is supported by scientists' latest observations and experiments, and is based on Einstein's widely accepted theory of general relativity. But scientists are always on the lookout for any evidence that might suggest an alternative to the Big Bang. The latest in this area of research comes from astrophysicists Maximo Banados and Pedro Ferreira, who have resurrected a theory of gravity from the early 20th century and discovered that a modified version of the theory may hold some surprises.

"In a recent study published in Physical Review Letters, Banados and Ferreira have reconsidered the theory of gravity proposed by Arthur Eddington, a contemporary of Einstein. Eddington is perhaps best known for his trip to the Island of Principe on the west coast of Africa in 1919, where during a solar eclipse he observed that the Sun's gravity does indeed bend starlight, providing one of the earliest confirmations of general relativity.

"In a recent study published in Physical Review Letters, Banados and Ferreira have reconsidered the theory of gravity proposed by Arthur Eddington, a contemporary of Einstein. Eddington is perhaps best known for his trip to the Island of Principe on the west coast of Africa in 1919, where during a solar eclipse he observed that the Sun's gravity does indeed bend starlight, providing one of the earliest confirmations of general relativity.

"Although Eddington played a significant role in developing general relativity, during the following decades he became more interested in finding a theory to unify gravity and quantum mechanics - a task that is still being studied today. In 1924, Eddington proposed a new “gravitational action” as an alternative to the Einstein-Hilbert action, which could serve as an alternative starting point to general relativity. In astrophysics, a gravitational action is the mechanism that describes how gravity can emerge from space-time being curved by matter and energy. However, Eddington’s theory of gravity only worked for empty space and didn’t include any source of energy such as matter, making it an incomplete theory.

"Since Eddington’s proposal, scientists have attempted various ways of including matter into the theory, although they have run into problems. In this study, Banados and Ferreira have tried a new way to extend the theory to include matter by using a gravitational action called the Born-Infeld action.

"In their analysis, the scientists found that a key characteristic of Eddington’s revised theory of gravity is that it reproduces Einstein gravity precisely in the vacuum conditions (with no matter), but it produces new effects when matter is added. Due to this characteristic, the revised theory has implications especially for high-density regions, such as in the very early Universe or within a black hole. For instance, the theory predicts a maximum density of homogeneous and isotropic space-time, which could have implications for black hole formation.

"More intriguingly, the theory could lead to an entirely new view of the Universe that doesn't include a Big Bang. In Big Bang theory, the state of the Universe is a singularity in early times, meaning that the Universe was once infinitely small. However, Eddington’s revised theory requires a minimum length of space-time at early times, which means that the Universe could not have been a singularity. The theory predicts that, depending on the Universe’s initial density, it may have loitered for a long time at a relatively small size before growing large enough to be controlled by standard cosmological evolution. Another possibility, depending on the initial conditions, is that the Universe could have undergone a bounce, resulting from the collapse of a previous Universe.

"Any kind of singularity-free Universe would solve the singularity problem that has bothered scientists about general relativity, since a singularity cannot be mathematically defined.
"Any kind of singularity-free Universe would solve the singularity problem that has bothered scientists about general relativity, since a singularity cannot be mathematically defined. “Taking as a starting point what is a very old idea, we have ended up with a theory that has this very interesting property of not having singularities,” Ferreira, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Oxford, told PhysOrg.com. “It was unexpected and definitely not what we were looking for.”

"In the future, Banados and Ferreira hope to perform a more detailed analysis of the gravitational Born-Infeld action. While the current study only looks at the classical behavior of the theory, there could also be quantum behavior, such as with the bounce concept. In addition, the scientists plan to look at the possible effects of a cosmological constant, which they did not investigate here. However, they note that the theory is still in the early conceptual stages, and has a long way to go before they know how accurate it is. “The alternatives to Einstein's theory are all hypothetical possibilities,” Ferreira said. “The goal is to try and find some key observational test that may distinguish between Einstein's theory and the one we have stumbled upon.” "
 
What Hawking meant when he said ‘there are no black holes BY REBECCA JACOBSON February 6, 2014
LINK: What Hawking meant when he said 'there are no black holes'
TEXT: "Last week, famed physicist Stephen Hawking made headlines with this bold statement: “there are no black holes.” Those words come directly from Hawking’s latest paper, but they are contained within a larger point involving the mechanics of a black hole and its famous “event horizon.”(That’s the area thought to exist around a black hole from which nothing, not even light, can escape.) To be clear, Hawking was not claiming that black holes don’t exist. Astronomers have been observing black holes for decades, said Joseph Polchinski, theoretical physicist at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

"What Hawking did was propose an explanation to one of the most puzzling problems in theoretical physics. How can black holes exist when they seem to break two fundamental laws of physics — Einstein’s laws of relativity and quantum mechanics? We’ll explain.

"First, a quick Physics 101 reminder. Einstein’s theory of general relativity first conceived a black hole as an object with a gravitational pull so powerful that anything — gas, dust, stars, planets, whole galaxies, even light — that crossed the event horizon would fall in and be forever trapped and ultimately crushed, never to escape. But with the emergence of quantum mechanics in the mid-20th century, many believed that this information — the particles and matter sucked into the black hole — had to be conserved, somewhere. According to quantum mechanics, a black hole could shred a book into its subatomic particles, but as long as all the pieces still existed, it was possible to reconstruct that book, Polchinski explained.

"Then Hawking published a paper on black holes in the 1970s, and everything changed. He proposed that in fact, black holes were losing mass and would eventually evaporate. If they evaporated, they would take all traces of what fell into them with it. The information would not, in fact, be conserved. It would vanish. Suddenly, science didn’t make sense. The field of physics was faced with a giant dilemma.

This question of what ultimately happens to all the stuff drawn into the black hole has become known as “the information paradox.” “This is a paradox that hasn’t been completely resolved,” said Juan Maldacena at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. “There are various ideas for how it could be resolved, but I think no one has convinced the other members of the community that his idea is correct.” That includes, he said, Hawking’s latest proposal, which reimagines the event horizon.

"In a nutshell, Hawking seems to be saying this: instead of an event horizon, there is something else he calls an “apparent horizon.” In this apparent horizon, matter and energy is temporarily suspended, but then released. If this is true, it changes black holes as we know them. “The absence of event horizons means that there are no black holes — in the sense of regimes from which light can’t escape to infinity,” Hawking wrote in his paper.

According to his proposal, black holes do trap information for a long time, but that information can, eventually, escape, Polchinski said. He added that Hawking’s proposal remains untested. “The broader picture is right now that we really have this conflict between two theories, quantum mechanics and Einstein’s theory of gravity, both of which we have strong reason to believe are true. And yet when you combine them, they make this prediction of information loss that we believe is false,” Polchinski said.

"Over the past 40 years, physicists have proposed multiple solutions, forcing the field to rethink black-hole behavior. In 1992, for example, Leonard Susskind, Larus Thorlacius and John Uglom proposed an idea known as “complementarity.”

"Then there’s the complicated “firewall paradox.” In 2012, Polchinski and his colleagues found a problem with the event horizon. As particles enter the event horizon, they’re ripped apart. As these particles break down, their research showed, they release a burst of energy, creating a firewall around the center of the black hole. This has become known as “the firewall paradox.” This notion of the event horizon as a highly energetic region throws another wrench in Einstein’s theory, which said that nothing special should happen at the event horizon. That’s where Hawking’s latest paper comes in, suggesting physicists need to rethink that event horizon. His latest proposal suggests that there is in fact no event horizon to burn up. Instead, the apparent horizon becomes the real boundary.

"If you’re confused, you’re not alone, said Matt Strassler, blogger and visiting theoretical physicist at Harvard University. The entire theoretical physics community is still working on these problems, and this represents merely one proposal among dozens. “There’s all sorts of cacophony in the field … The problem is no one can come up, so far, with something you can actually calculate. So it’s ideas and proposals and approximations and guesses,” he said.

"Notably, Hawking’s work has not yet been peer-reviewed, and it contains no equations, so there’s no way to test his new ideas, Polchinski said. Because of that, he added, his statement about black holes can’t be considered a breakthrough in science — yet. Hawking’s paper appeared online last week on an online server for research articles operated by Cornell University called arXiv.

"How can any of these paradoxes around black holes be answered? For now, the mathematical formulas to test and solve these new hypotheses simply aren’t there, Strassler said, adding that these are conceptual problems, not just a math problems. “These aren’t the kind of calculations you can just throw at a computer. Even to figure out what questions you need to ask isn’t obvious,” he said. “The calculations themselves involve very, very subtle effects that a computer would never be able to keep track of.”

"The problems have everyone in the field confused, Polchinski said, but that confusion is thrilling for physicists. Solving a paradox is the way the field advances, he said. “It’s not so much that there’s a mistake, but somehow, some assumption that we believe about quantum mechanics and gravity is wrong, and we’re trying to figure out what it is,” Polchinski said. “It’s confusion, but it’s confusion that we hope makes us ripe for advance.” "
 
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