Zero-Point Energy Stars

[Underemployed]

Just read this article from New Scientist:
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/fundamentals/mg18925423.600.html
Amazing stuff, really - in a few years the idea of Black Holes may turn out to have been no more substantial than canals on Mars.

Essentially, the idea is that there is no such thing as Black Holes - what we are seeing are dark energy stars, hollow shells where the entire surface of the star has undergone a "quantum critical phase transition" where the electrons have apparently stopped spinning. The interior is a vaccuum, which provides the sucking power we attribute to the enormous mass of a singularity.

Actually that sounds pretty unlikely too. I wonder what our children will be learning about these things a few years down the line.

 

[Nucular]

The interior is a vaccuum, which provides the sucking power we attribute to the enormous mass of a singularity.

Wouldn't it fairly quickly stop being a vacuum then?

New Scientist is great, but I do think it's often a bit to eager to report new, untested and unreviewed ideas as cutting-edge science, when in fact it's an interesting idea we'll never hear of again.

They often have covers which shout things like "THE END OF QUANTUM PHYSICS!", "THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS GRAVITY!" "DOES THINKING REALLY HAPPEN IN THE BRAIN?" and so forth, and the articles are fascinating and well-written, but simply don't come to anything. I'd speculate that this will be another.

 

[espritch]

New Scientist is great, but I do think it's often a bit to eager to report new, untested and unreviewed ideas as cutting-edge science, when in fact it's an interesting idea we'll never hear of again.

I don't really see this as a bad thing. Science thrives on new ideas and new approaches to old problems. If science magazines didn't report on out on the edge ideas, they really wouldn't have a lot to talk about in an average issue (at least not much of interest to anyone but a specialist in a field).

Of course you have to take every new idea with a grain of salt; most will turn out to be wrong. But every so often, one might just turn out to be right and totally change the way we look at the universe.

 

[Marker]

I agree with your comments about New Scientist. Its a brilliant magazine but they have succumbed over the past few years to sensationalist headlines that rarely deliver when you actually read the article.

On the other hand - if this means that more people buy the mag and thereby get exposed to good real science reporting then I dont see this as a bad thing.

 

[TV's Frank]

If science magazines didn't report on out on the edge ideas, they really wouldn't have a lot to talk about in an average issue (at least not much of interest to anyone but a specialist in a field).

I would have to respectifully disagree here. I think there is an incredible amount of good, solid research out there that Average Joe (well, Average Science Magazine Reader Joe) would find interesting. For example, there's so many pop-sci books and articles aout String Theory, but not so many about Quantum Field Theory. QFT is a well-tested, well-grounded theory, and is chock full of crazy ideas and incredible feats of imagination. The picture QFT paints of the world is an amazing one, and well worth considerable attention in the popular press.

Now discussing new ideas is not a bad thing, however. The problem I have with articles from magazines such as New Scientist is that they only discuss the positive aspects of new ideas. They go on and on about how this or that hypothesis completely explains everything, and how the Old Theory is so old and busted and completely lacking. They don't balance it with discussions of how well the Old Theory explains things (it wouldn't be around in the first place if it wasn't good at explaining something), and how the New Theory might be lacking in explaining certain phenomena.

 

[Dark Jaguar]

Who cares if the interior is a vacuum? The universe is close enough to a vacuum relative to the Earth and we don't see the atmosphere being sucked away. That seems to show a lack of understanding of how a vacuum actually works. It's not that the vacuum pulls, it's that the stuff that seems to be getting "sucked" into it has less resistance travelling in the direction of the vacuum than in the direction of the other stuff.

Vacuums do not suck, they blow.

Don't start.

 

[wollery]

Okay, so I've just read that article. The interior of the star isn't just a vacuum, it contains vacuum energy, and the larger the star was to start with the greater the vacuum energy. The star still has all of the mass it started with, except that it's converted to vacuum energy!

This is an intriguing idea, and it seems to have some merit, although there are other forum members who are better qualified than me to assess it.

 

[to.by]

I think someone has got things the wrong way around here. A black hole is not something that has been observed and later fitted into a hypothesis or theory. Black holes were predicted as a consequence of an existing theory, and one has later found objects that can be black holes. That these objects can be explained by another hypothesis does not invalidate the theory that led to the prediction of black holes. There is a possibility that they don't contradict each other.

 

[tracer]

They often have covers which shout things like "THE END OF QUANTUM PHYSICS!", "THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS GRAVITY!" "DOES THINKING REALLY HAPPEN IN THE BRAIN?" and so forth,

The cover for the issue with the black-hole article in question shows the silhouette of a pregnant woman with butterflies superimposed on it, with the caption "ARE WE STILL EVOLVING?".

That would be a very, very short article, if it really wanted to answer that question.