First, head over to New Scientist and get a load of this: 70 great minds in science forecasting the next big thing in their area of expertise. [HT: Cosmic Variance]
Second, a caution: what follows are the musings of a scientist speaking outside of his area of expertise. You've been warned.
Third, apropos my title: in volume 12, issue 1 of New Astonomy, a very interesting article by Greg Bayer appears on pp. 47-51. The title of this article is, innocently enough, "Nonconservation of energy by the vacuum". It only addresses the question of whether or not black holes are capable of generating energy via gravitational repulsion, but it challenges the most basic assumption of science -- that energy and matter are conserved entities; something doesn't come from nothing. Most scientists who have been interviewed by world-science.net have dismissed it, but no one has yet weighed in with a definitive reason why the paper is flawed [aside from the obvious issue of breaking a fundamental assumption].
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Technorati tags: Cosmology
Within black holes or similar objects, he argues, extreme conditions may inject “instability” into the vacuum, converting parts of it into non-vacuum, or matter. “Matter creation can be said to arise from some new particle interaction which violates energy conservation,” he wrote in an email.And, most importantly, to establish this as more than just armchair ramblings:
Einstein determined that an object’s gravity depends not just on its mass, as was known before, but its pressure. If an object has enough negative pressure, its gravity can also become negative, and hence repulsive rather than attractive.
Bayer argued that matter creation is associated with repulsive gravity because it’s also linked to negative pressure. “The flow of energy into the Universe can be described as being caused by an external pressure from the vacuum,” he wrote in an email. “Viewed from inside the Universe, the positive external pressure looks like a negative internal pressure.” (link)
Bayer said his theory of energy non-conservation could be tested using particle accelerators, which bash subatomic particles together to help see what they’re made of. Normally, conservation of energy is used to calculate properties of the particles flying out of the bang-up. But the law is assumed, rather than proven, in these experiments, Bayer argued. “A serious test of energy conservation in high-energy collisions will require careful analysis of many complex multi-particle events,” he wrote in his paper. This would be hard, he added, but it can be done. (link)Following this issue, we find in v.12 i.2, pp.146-160, an article that may or may not tie in to this question. Abhas Mitra writes in the abstract,
Eddington was the first physicist to introduce special relativity into the problem and correctly insist that, actually, total energy stored in a star is not the mere Newtonian energy but the total mass energy (E = Mc2)...This concept has a fundamental importance though we know now that Sun in its present form cannot survive for more than 10 billion years. We extend this concept by introducing general relativity and show that the minimum value of depletion of total mass–energy is tE = ∞ not only for Sun but for and sufficiently massive or dense object. We propose that this time scale be known in the name of “Einstein–Eddington”. We also point out that, recently, it has been shown that as massive stars undergo continued collapse to become a Black Hole, first they become extremely relativistic radiation pressure supported stars. And the life time of such relativistic radiation pressure supported compact stars is indeed dictated by this Einstein–Eddington time scale whose concept is formally developed here. Since this observed time scale of this radiation pressure supported quasistatic state turns out to be infinite, [tE = ∞] such objects are called eternally collapsing objects (ECO). Further since ECOs are expected to have strong intrinsic magnetic field, they are also known as “Magnetospheric ECO” or MECO.I will be interested to read the first detailed response to Bayer's article, and to see whether or not the second article ties into it, both in the blogosphere (at sites like Sean's) and in the journals. There has always been something about black holes that made scientists believe they may reveal key discoveries about the origins of our own universe. Sean thinks we'll know much more very soon (link).
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Technorati tags: Cosmology
