On Wed, Nov 16, 2022 at 7:25 PM <[email protected]> wrote:
> *> Setting aside relativity for the nonce, the workability of > transversable wormholes is getting more, > better! https://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevD.106.104024 > <https://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevD.106.104024>* The trouble with the idea that a Black Hole is the mouth of a wormhole is that the other end of the wormhole should be a White Hole and nobody has ever detected one .... unless the Big Bang was a White Hole. Physicist Lee Smolin talks about this in his book "The Life Of The Cosmos" where he introduces the idea of Cosmological Natural Selection. Smolin's concept is that when a star collapses into a Black Hole a Singularity does not form in its center, instead everything bounces back before infinite density is reached. You would not see this from the outside of the Black Hole but from the inside such a thing would look like a Big Bang, and a new universe would be formed. In that new universe the constants of physics, the 20 or so numbers that can't be derived and must be put in by hand by physicists to make their theories conform with observation, are similar to their parent universe but not identical, there would be some small random variation. Universes that have laws encouraging the formation of Black Holes will thus have more descendants than those that don't. All this sounds very much like Darwin's idea written on a cosmic scale because it has the 2 things that are needed, natural selection and inheritance (although some have questioned the inheritance part wondering if information can really cross the event horizon, even mutated information). Smolin does not predict that as a result of this Evolution the physical constants in our universe are perfect for the formation of Black Holes, but he does predict no small change in them will make more Black Holes. And Black Holes need stars that go supernova, and those stars produce carbon and oxygen that also causes dust clouds to cool more and collapse into yet more large stars that go supernova and form more Black Holes. Those heavy elements also cause life to form, but as far as Cosmological Natural Selection is concerned that's just an unimportant byproduct. But what about Primordial Black Holes, you don't need stars to make them. According to inflation theory the expansion of our universe started slow but then in just 10^-36 seconds space expanded by a factor of 10^78; during that time the universe grew by a larger percentage than it has from then to now 13.8 billion years later. There is a number called the Size Density Constant, if it were much larger all the matter in the universe would form Black Holes almost immediately, but it turns out that then the universe would inflate for even less than 10^-36 seconds so there would be much less matter in it, so although all its matter would be in the form of Black Holes it would have fewer Black Holes than our universe does. Smolin makes another prediction, this one is about Neutron Stars. Cosmological Natural Selection predicts that the maximum mass a Neutron Star can be is lower than previously thought and thus more Black Holes can be produced due to a particle called the Kaon. The conventional idea is that in a Neutron Star the pressure is so high electrons are forced into protons forming neutrons and that's the end of the story, and if that's true then the maximum mass of a Neutron star is somewhere between 2.5 and 2.9 solar masses.But that's without considering Kaons, Smolin found that theory says some interesting things happens to them when the pressure gets very high. Normally Kaons are much more massive than electrons and thus unstable, but under ultra high pressure suddenly the individual wave function of the particles will merge, much like what happens to electrons in superconductors, and their effective mass should be reduced by a lot, perhaps even to less than that of an electron. If that actually happens then things would be reversed and electrons would become unstable and decay into Kaons (and Neutrinos which fly out of the star and play no further part in the story). In this scenario the upper mass limit for a neutron star is between 1.6 and 2 solar masses. If it were greater than that a Black Hole would form because the Kaon-Proton-Neutron soup at the center would be even more dense than degenerate neutron matter, so the Neutron Star would be smaller and its surface gravity greater, and thus a Black Hole can be formed with less mass. But would the effective mass of the Kaon really become less than that of the electron? Nobody knows for sure but we do know that the mass of the Kaon depends on the mass of the Strange Quark, and the Strange Quark has little involvement with everyday matter in our everyday world, so in a universe that had a Strange Quark with a mass very different from our own things would be pretty much the same as they are here except the maximum size of a Neutron Star and thus the minimum size of a Black Hole would be different. The two most massive neutron stars where the mass has been accurately measured are PSR J0348+0432 with 2.01±0.04 solar masses and PSR J1614–2230 with 1.97 ± 0.04 solar masses. So far the Kaon idea survives by the skin of its teeth. There is another Neutron Star whose mass might be as high as 2.5 solar masses but that measurement is much less precise than the others, however Smolin says if it holds up then the Cosmological Natural Selection idea will have been disproved. By the way the smallest Black Hole found so far is GRO J1655-40 with 5.31±.07 solar masses. The reason for the large observational gap between the most massive Neutron Star and the least massive Black Hole is probably because small Black Holes are generally harder to detect than Neutron Stars. John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis <https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis> i7x -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv2Kar3M-u0WMuFsJwhMX1sQsRvndGaynXaqrExc9zbvaA%40mail.gmail.com.
