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----------------------------- 2213 - SpaceTime from atoms to blackholes
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- When you look into a starry night sky you see the stars in a sea of blackness, empty space. You do not see anything between the stars because of the massive emptiness that separates everything. They say space is what separates everything and time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
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- Despite how common and essential space and time are to our everyday lives it remains a system very hard to understand because of its staggering complexity. Einstein really confused us when he proposed the general theory of relativity that said gravity was not a force that propagated through space but it was the result of space and time being warped. The curvature of space time is what causes gravity.
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- When the baseball arcs through the outfield to land over the left field fence it is because the mass of Earth is distorting space time and the baseball is following the path of least resistance trough the curvature of space time. Go figure?
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- What happens when you look to gravity in even more detail? At the very smallest dimensions Einstein’s theory gives us math that is unsolvable, it is full of infinities that we can not get rid of. We need a new theory of quantum gravity that works at the smallest dimensions.. But, after 2,500 years of searching for an underlying truth for gravity we are still searching for the math that works for both the smallest and largest dimensions. .
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- To begin gravity with is so weak compared to the other forces of magnetism, electric charge, and the nuclear forces. Yet this weakest of forces is thought to have quantum effects that created the mottled pattern in the early universe that has expanded into the stars and galaxies we see today. We owe our universe to the quantum fluctuations of the gravitations field.
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- The best laboratory to study the quantum effects of gravity seems to be the most massive objects in the universe, blackholes. We start with the equations that work perfectly well in our laboratories and extrapolate them into the conditions found in blackholes. Math ventures into these most extreme conceivable conditions.
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- The math in General Relativity predicts that matter entering into a blackhole gets compressed without limits into a “singularity”. Time itself comes to a stop. Spacetime itself ceases to exist.
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- Maybe at the edges of the blackhole the math still holds? The edge is called the event horizon whereby any matter passing through it can never gets back out. Its descent to a singularity is irreversible.
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- At a much smaller scale this same mystery existed with the “blackbody experiments” in the 1800’s. The math predicted that blackbodies would absorb an infinite amount of heat. This problem was solved with Einstein’s theory of discrete packets of energy, later called photons. Energy was not continuous. This math showed that a blackbody could reach thermal equilibrium if the radiated energy came in discrete units, or quanta. It was not continuous.
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- Some progress was made with the math for blackholes when Stephen Hawking showed that blackholes have a non-zero temperature. And, at the event horizon they could both absorb and emit energy. Particles could separate and “boil” off at the event horizon boundary. It is random heat energy that is evaporating at the horizon.
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- As the blackhole emits this Hawking radiation it shrinks in size. And, given enough time it would totally evaporate away back in to space.
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- To study this Hawking phenomena science has invented the smallest possible scale for a space to exist. It is called the Planck scale that has the smallest dimension of 10^-35 meters.
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- The thermodynamics of blackholes is measuring the entropy of the system that is at the edge of microscopic complexity. Our Einstein math does not work. If you increase the radius of a blackhole by a factor of 10 the number of molecules goes up by a factor of 100. If you increase the radius of a beach ball by factor of 10 the volume and the number of molecules goes up by a factor of 1,000.
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- For blackholes the number of molecules it contains is not proportional to its volume but rather to its surface area. The blackhole may look like it is 3-dimensional but it behaves as though it was 2-dimensional. This effect is called the holographic principle.
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- The building blocks of space may not be spatial. The geometric properties of space may be a collective behavior and not that of individual atoms.
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- Like the molecule of water that flows, forms droplets, is carried in waves, freezes and boils. But the individual H2O molecule does none of these things. What you see is its collective behavior. The building blocks of space may not be spatial. What we observe may be some form of collective behavior.
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- It could be that space reconfigures itself in different phases just like water does. Blackholes may be places where these phase transitions can occur. This could be indicated by the discoveries we see from “quantum entanglement”
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- Quantum entanglement appears to be more primitive than space itself. With entanglement particles appear to be entangled regardless of separation in space. Entanglement may provide the link between the presence of matter and the geometry of spacetime. The link also is with gravity, the more entanglement, the weaker the gravity.
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- We can never experience spacetime directly we always infer its existence from everyday experiences. In order to explain some new fundamental structure we need new discoveries and new math to explain new phenomena like quantum gravity and entanglement.
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- Where is another Einstein when we need one? We believe at the tiniest scales space emerges from ‘quanta”. But, how do you explain these building blocks that need to reach what we do experience? It is what we take for granted. I depend on space and time every day.
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- There are several more Reviews on “space” and these below on “spacetime”:
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- 1790 - This review explains why space must bend and time must slow in order to adhere to the Theory of Relativity.
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- This review lists 7 more Reviews about space-time.
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- 1773 - The size of space depends on how fast your are.
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- 1407 - Space is in constant motion. It s anything but empty.
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- 1242 - At the smallest level things remain connected.
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- 781 - Space is much todo about nothing.
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- December 19, 2018
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