Cosmology: Wow. It takes guts to wage war with Stephen Hawking ... he appeared in Star Trek

But some dare.

See this review by Michelle Press in Scientific American (October 8, 2008): In The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics (Little, Brown, 2008), Leonard Susskind, a professor of theoretical physics at Stanford University, recounts the battle over the true nature of black holes that he and Dutch physicist Gerard ’t Hooft have waged with Stephen Hawking:

In 1976 Stephen Hawking imagined throwing a bit of information—a book, a computer, even an elementary particle—into a black hole. Black holes, Hawking believed, were the ultimate traps, and the bit of information would be irretrievably lost to the outside world. This apparently innocent observation was hardly as innocent as it sounds; it threatened to undermine and topple the entire edifice of modern physics. Something was terribly out of whack; the most basic law of nature—the conservation of information—was seriously at risk. To those who paid attention, either Hawking was wrong or the three-hundred-year-old center of physics wasn’t holding....

Okay, now comes the politics:

The Black Hole War was a genuine scientific controversy—nothing like the pseudo-debates over intelligent design, or the existence of global warming. Those phony arguments, cooked up by political manipulators to confuse a naive public, don’t reflect any real scientific differences of opinion. By contrast, the split over black holes was very real.... It was not a war between angry enemies; indeed the main participants are all friends. But it was a fierce intellectual struggle of ideas between people who deeply respected each other but also profoundly disagreed.

Aw, c'mon, Susskind. The public - who must make a living in circumstances more difficult than you can even guess - is not as naive as you imagine. And the hostility belies your claim that you are all "friends." I have so many better friends, I could lend you some for free.

There are lots of reasons for doubting Darwin and Susskind, and accepting a design of life and the universe.

I have not studied global warming, but do wish warming would hurry up. We had another frost warning last night, in Toronto, at latitude 43N. Good thing I never got around to planting the tomatoes ...

We are told:

The conservation of energy appeared first as a mathematical deduction from our models for classical systems but has been incorporated for all of physics. Let us not forget that the conservation of energy was in question in the 30's vis-à-vis beta decay. Bohr and Heisenberg thought that the conservation of energy was violated whereas Pauli, Rutherford and Dirac did not want to part with the conservation of energy.

So no one really knows? Well, we shall see.

The black hole: Does it or doesn't it destroy information?

Here John Johnson Jr. interviews Stanford's Leonard Susskind, whose claim to fame is that he is Stephen "black hole" Hawking's nemesis (Los Angeles Times. July 26, 2008). Susskind has printed Hawking's letter conceding that information is not necessarily lost in a black hole:

I was a particle physicist when I was invited to an event at Werner Erhard's house in 1981. Erhard [founder of the est self-awareness movement] admired scientists and liked to listen to them debate. At one of his events, I met Stephen Hawking. Stephen discovered an amazing fact, which is that black holes evaporate. It's like a puddle of water out in the sun.

Susskind thinks that was wrong.

It violates one of the fundamental principles of physics, which says nothing is ever lost completely. You may say, "How can you say information isn't lost? I can erase information on my computer." But every time a bit of information is erased, we know it doesn't disappear. It goes out into the environment. It may be horribly scrambled and confused, but it never really gets lost. It's just converted into a different form.

I am not sure what that means. If information is horribly scrambled and confused, it isn't just converted to a different form, it can be basically lost.

If I told you that my late cat's name was &*&^^%**!, how would that help you figure out what the cat's name was, without any regular encoding/decoding system in place?

Something about all this doesn't make sense, and I am not surprised to learn that Susskind is one of many anti-intelligent design folk who would love to believe there is a zillion universes (so absolutely anything could be true about our universe and it wouldn't prove anything, right?):

Since the early 1980s, some cosmologists have argued that multiple universes could have formed during a period of cosmic inflation that preceded the Big Bang. More recently, string theorists have calculated that there could be 10 [to the]500 universes, which is more than the number of atoms in our observable Universe. Under these circumstances, it becomes more reasonable to assume that several would turn out like ours. It’s like getting zillions and zillions of darts to throw at the dart board, Susskind says. “Surely, a large number of them are going to wind up in the target zone.” And of course, we exist in our particular Universe because we couldn’t exist anywhere else. It’s an intriguing idea with just one problem, says Gross: “It’s impossible to disprove.” Because our Universe is, almost by definition, everything we can observe, there are no apparent measurements that would confirm whether we exist within a cosmic landscape of multiple universes, or if ours is the only one. And because we can’t falsify the idea, Gross says, it isn’t science. (Geoff Brumfiel, "Outrageous Fortune," Nature, Vol 439:10-12 (January 5, 2006).)

[ ... ]

Susskind, too, finds it “deeply, deeply troubling” that there’s no way to test the principle. But he is not yet ready to rule it out completely. “It would be very foolish to throw away the right answer on the basis that it doesn’t conform to some criteria for what is or isn’t science,” he says. (Geoff Brumfiel, "Outrageous Fortune," Nature, Vol 439:10-12 (January 5, 2006)

Notice he says that about the multiverse, but not about intelligent design of our universe - for which we have evidence.

Note: I seem to recall a Canadian physicist once telling m that Hawking had admitted the same thing to him too. Maybe he should have got a letter ...

Political correctness stumbles on science: "Black hole" to be a banned word now?

Yes, amazingly, a race hustling ruckus actually developed recently in the United States (where else?) around the astronomy term "black hole".

Generally, a black hole is thought to be the final fate of a very massive star that collapses on itself, sucking up even light (hence the name). Because the hole destroys all the information it ingests, the term "black hole" often suits a junkpile office or a useless bureaucracy.

(In defense of junkpile offices and useless bureaucracies, let me state up front that they destroy information at a rate that is only fifteen to three hundred times as fast as an intrastellar black hole out in space ... )

Here's columnist Jonah Goldberg's explanation of the nutty Dallas County controversy.

Commissioner Kenneth Mayfield found himself guilty of talking while white. He observed that the bureaucracy "has become a black hole" for lost paperwork.

Fellow Commissioner John Wiley Price took great offense, shouting, "Excuse me!" That office, the black commissioner explained, has become a "white hole."

Seizing on the outrage, Judge Thomas Jones demanded that Mayfield apologize for the "racially insensitive analogy," in the words of the Dallas Morning News' City Hall Blog.

[ ... ]

Call me nostalgic, but there was a time when this sort of stupidity actually generated controversy. Remember the Washington, D.C., official who used the word "niggardly" correctly in a sentence only to lose his job? That at least generated debate.

But these days, stories like this vomit forth daily and, for the most part, we roll our eyes, chuckle a bit and shrug them off.

Obviously, there's something to be said for ignoring the childish grievance-peddling that motivates so much of this nonsense. But the simple fact is that ignoring political correctness has done remarkably little to combat it. Meanwhile, people who make a big deal about it are often cast as the disgruntled obsessive ones.

The only people allowed to take political correctness seriously are the writers for "South Park," "Family Guy," "The Simpsons" and the like. Of course, they take it seriously because it's their bread and butter to mock the absurd pieties of daily life. But nearly everywhere else, the rule of thumb is that we should either defer to this stuff or quietly ignore it.

I think where science terminology is concerned, the thumb should be pointed straight up ...

The grievance mongers should go back to investigating "bad" words in modernist literature written by people who empty the Scrabble bag from different positions when they need to write something - and hope that whatever turns up is usable.

Here's more and still more if anyone cares.

(Note: The "black hole"image is from NASA.)

A friend recalls physicist John Wheeler ...

A.J. Meyer fondly remembers John Wheeler, who coined the term "black hole", who died recently at age 96. He offers the following anecdote:

About twenty years ago, I sent out numerous drafts of a paper I had been working on for commentary.

One of the conundrums that I dealt with in the paper, was the failure of black hole thermodynamics to correspond to the Third Law.

One of the kindest replies came from Professor John Wheeler in a telephone conversation. Wheeler said that my solution to the conundrum was good, and said, in effect, "In all my thirty or so years of black hole research, it has never occurred to me to incorporate the area of the inner event horizon as a measure of negative entropy. How did you think of it?" Recalling how Irwin Schrödinger answered when he was asked how he came up with his famous wave equation, I replied in all sincerity "To quote Schrödinger, 'it came from God'.''

As far as I know, Wheeler, was always an honest seeker of truth and one of the most humble of physicists, who as a group are not known for their humility. He will be missed.

Here's a part of Meyer's work on the Third Law solution.