It's funny how these things can turn out. I'm not talking fate here, just going off-topic picking up on your story. I came off my bike going 40mph a few years back. I landed on the other side of the road in front of the oncoming traffic and fortunately they somehow managed not to run over me. Apart from a bloody helmet (I've kept it) a few scars and a night in hospital, I pretty much walked away from it. There's a guy on the Sunderland board who has just came off his bike going 5mph. He's been staying in the RVI needing treatment for multiple breaks in his vertebrae, ribs and more. I got lucky that day. He's been extremely unlucky.
Very rude. You're the thread host. You should be more welcoming to your guests. Or will brb make it Crime - part trois?
Annoyingly it actually did. You lot never looked back from then. So i guess a question of fate is: what if Klopp hadn't led you in that pantomime encore? That's one for the philosophers.
That is part of the thing that drives me crazy, I can recall many things in my life where a single change would have changed the whole pathway but what is done is done The real freaky thing about it was for weeks before I knew something was going to happen but no idea how or when only that I would survive and things would be different Also I was convinced after the accident that Space Oddity was released in 1967 because I heard it lying in the hospital bed but everyone convinced me it was released in 1969 The freakiest thing of all was a dream I had that my wife and I went to see her mother in the mortuary, we were the age then that we actually were but her mum who was a good looking 50 yr old was a wizzes old woman of about 90, I didn't say anything to my wife of course A month or so later she was diagnosed with bowel cancer and we were seeing her every weekend after her op but she was told that it was terminal Because we had cats and the house was getting in a mess, we both worked full time she went on her own, I then went down with her after a couple more weeks because her time was near when I saw her I had the shock of my life she had turned into a frail 90 yr old that could hardly walk, she passed away that weekend and a few days later when we went to pay our respects in the mortuary she was as I had seen her in my dream a few months before
If i didnt put my hand on the cooker hob i wouldnt have a burnt hand now... please log in to view this image
Does this help? The black hole paradox that thwarts our understanding of reality Black holes devour stuff and then shrivel away over billions of years. Explaining what happens to anything that falls in explodes our current theories of physics, says cosmologist Paul Davies PHYSICS 22 September 2021 By Paul Davies please log in to view this image Jordi Ros PLAY a movie of an everyday scene backwards and we laugh because it is so preposterous. We can readily distinguish past from future, and only see processes that seem to move from the one to the other. Yet this bald fact of our existence – what we call time’s arrow – is, to physicists, a mystery. The laws of physics underpinning the everyday world are symmetric in time. They are reversible, working just as well backwards as forwards. A new slant on that picture comes from the interior of a black hole. Almost half a century ago, Stephen Hawking made a startling discovery about these monsters, summoned into existence by general relativity, Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity. It implied that black holes break the fundamental time symmetry of physics, destroying information and preventing, even theoretically, the reversal of a sequence of events from the future back to the past. This has become known as the black hole information paradox. It highlights a profound disconnect between general relativity and another great pillar of modern physics, quantum theory, and stands in the way of a long-held dream – a theory that unites the two. Just recently, there have been claims that the paradox is close to a resolution. Personally, I’m not so sure. But the twists and turns of this long-running saga have always contained surprises, with potentially huge consequences for our quest to better understand how the world works at the most basic level. To see the essence of the problem, imagine a box divided in two by a membrane, with oxygen gas on one side and nitrogen on the other. If the membrane is removed, the oxygen and nitrogen diffuse into each other in what seems like an irreversible transition: you couldn’t deduce by looking at a uniform mixture of oxygen and nitrogen what its initial state was. But if, by some magic, we knew every detail of every molecule, we could use the reversible laws of physics to work backwards to this state. At the molecular level, the arrow of time doesn’t seem to exist. Physicist John Wheeler, who coined the term “black hole”, expressed it in characteristically colourful fashion. “If you ask an atom about the arrow of time, it will laugh in your face,” he wrote. please log in to view this image Jordi Ros We perceive a macroscopic view of the world in which these molecular details are smeared out. In this picture, developed as part of 19th-century investigations of thermodynamics, time’s arrow is a secondary phenomenon. It is dependent on the limitations of our senses, making it apparently subjective. But then black holes entered the picture. A black hole’s defining feature is its event horizon, the boundary inside which gravity is so strong that light cannot escape. As nothing can go faster than light, this means anything crossing the event horizon is irreversibly lost to the outside universe. At least that is the case on a simple reading of general relativity. This also says that hidden from view in the heart of a black hole is a “singularity”, an infinitely warped edge or boundary of space-time where the laws of physics break down. Any matter that hits a singularity – and, crucially, any information encoded in that matter, for example how the molecules in a cloud of gas are distributed – must disappear from space-time. Evaporating information This is a challenge to traditional views about time and irreversibility. Compare the fate of an encyclopedia thrown into a black hole with one put into an incinerator. With the incinerator, if you knew the precise state of every molecule and every photon radiated as heat, you could, in principle, “run the movie backwards” and recover the information contained in the encyclopedia. Not so with a black hole. The information loss appears to be absolute and objective: there is no rewind button. The puzzlement really turned up a notch, however, in early 1974, when Stephen Hawking delivered a famous lecture at what is now the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford, UK. I was there. Hawking announced that black holes aren’t totally black, but glow faintly, because of the effects of quantum particles that pop up out of the vacuum near its event horizon and are radiated away. The process of emitting “Hawking radiation” slowly sucks energy from the black hole, so it gradually shrinks over an immense length of time. This was a sensational claim. The Hawking effect was puzzling on several levels, but one question stood out: if a black hole goes on shrinking, does it eventually totally disappear – and if so, what happens to all the stuff that fell into it? Hawking derived his result by appealing to quantum mechanics. Its laws are time-symmetric, so in theory you should be able to gather all the information encoded in the Hawking radiation and work backwards to the starting state, just as with an incinerated encyclopedia. But Hawking’s calculations showed that the radiation produced by a black hole is precisely “thermal” – entirely random – containing no information whatsoever about what fell into the hole originally. This is the basis of the black hole information paradox. The laws of quantum mechanics say that information can’t be destroyed. General relativity, by introducing black holes, apparently says it must be. “God not only plays dice, but sometimes throws them where they can’t be seen” I first discussed this clash with Hawking in a hotel room in Boston in the 1970s, where we had both travelled for a conference. At that time, Hawking, who was steeped in the general theory of relativity and its predictions about black hole singularities, thought the paradox indicated that quantum mechanics must break down in black holes. He published a paper claiming as much, containing the memorable aphorism – echoing Einstein’s criticism of quantum theory that “God does not play dice” – that “Not only does God play dice, but… he sometimes throws the dice where they cannot be seen.” Over the subsequent decades, however, many physicists have come to believe that quantum mechanics is sacrosanct, and that the lost information must somehow be returned to the outside universe. That is especially true among string theorists, whose efforts to construct a quantum theory of gravity are rooted in the standard rules of quantum mechanics. After wobbling for years, Hawking finally concurred. What went into the hole, he declared, must come out – in one form or another. But how? In the absence of a satisfactory theory of quantum gravity, Hawking’s original calculation was, crucially, “semi-classical”. It applied quantum mechanics to fields such as electromagnetism around the black hole, but not to the black hole’s own gravitational field. There is general agreement that such an approximation will break down, and quantum gravity effects must kick in, at the Planck scale of about 10-33 cm. This is a number calculated by combining Planck’s constant, which sets the strength of quantum effects, and Newton’s gravitational constant, which determines the strength of gravitation. The hope was that when a black hole shrank to such a size, new effects would emerge to solve the paradox. But as Don Page, a former postdoctoral collaborator of Hawking’s, pointed out in a major twist back in 1992, we can’t sweep the problem under a Planck-scale carpet. That is because of entanglement, the quantum phenomenon described by Einstein as “spooky action at a distance”. It says that if a pair of particles, for example photons of light, is created from the quantum vacuum, and the particles fly off in opposite directions, they remain intimately linked in their properties. Independent measurements performed simultaneously on the two particles will uncover that link. Entanglement is a much-studied quantum phenomenon, because it forms the basis for the design of quantum computers. Applied to Hawking radiation, pairs of entangled particles are created near a black hole, with one escaping and the other falling down the hole. Their entanglement implies a subtle residual connection reaching across the event horizon. In thermodynamics, physicists quantify lost or hidden information in terms of entropy, a general measure of disorder. When information goes down, entropy goes up, and vice versa. Every time a pair of photons is produced and one slips over the event horizon, “entanglement entropy” increases. When the Hawking effect starts out, the entanglement entropy is zero, but it rises steadily as more and more particles get created and separated by the horizon. please log in to view this image Swirling hot gas marks out the central black hole of galaxy M87, imaged by the Event Horizon Telescope in 2019 EHT Collaboration Page realised that this inexorable rise must have a limit. As originally suggested by Jacob Bekenstein in 1972, and confirmed by Hawking a couple of years later, a black hole possesses a total entropy proportional to its surface area. As a black hole evaporates, its surface area shrinks, and so does its total entropy. Thus, the entanglement entropy rises and the total entropy falls until, about halfway through the evaporation process, they become equal. At that point, something changes. Entanglement entropy can no longer go up, but falls with the total entropy as the hole continues to shrink. This loss of entanglement entropy implies the appearance of information. But where? As departures from randomness in the Hawking radiation; that is to say, correlations between particles within it. These correlations grow over time as the black hole shrinks towards its eventual demise. According to Page’s analysis, the original entanglement between pairs of outgoing and ingoing particles reappears as entanglement between outgoing particles – specifically, between particles emitted at earlier times and those emitted at later times. Entanglement in space becomes entanglement in time. Significantly, the turnover point occurs when the black hole is still a macroscopic, possibly huge object, very far from the Planck size at which quantum gravity can’t be ignored. The build-up of correlations in the outgoing Hawking flux would seem to be a neat way out of the information paradox. Information in does indeed equal information out, but it is concealed by being spread over time. If this is correct, the reversibility of the laws of physics is preserved by the black hole evaporation process. That is all well and good, but to buy this argument, you must conclude that there is something missing from Hawking’s original calculations, which say there is no entanglement or information in the radiation from the black hole. And there is no agreement on where the flaw might lie. Attempts to provide an answer so far have either appealed to idealised special cases or descended into speculative mathematical backwaters with only a tenuous link to reality. They provide at best circumstantial (and entirely theoretical) evidence that the information about the material that went into the black hole reappears in some guise in the Hawking radiation. One such idea is that the entanglement between pairs of particles produced near a black hole’s event horizon somehow gets erased before one falls down the hole. This entanglement destruction would release a vast amount of energy, resulting in an intensely destructive, incinerating surface known as a firewall encircling the event horizon. This firewall should produce conspicuous effects outside the black hole, but it contradicts a fundamental tenet of general relativity that the event horizon has no special local properties: it just marks the boundary where the strength of the black hole’s gravitational field becomes great enough that light cannot escape. The firewall prediction also comes from the questionable practice of considering particles as little packets of localised energy. Direct calculations of the quantum energy density round a black hole, first done in the 1970s, show it to be smoothed out and continuous at the event horizon. Some theoretical physicists retain the belief that only a fully worked-out theory of quantum gravity will produce a resolution to the paradox. Such a theory will probably include not just intense space-warping effects, but a feature known as topology change. Way back in the 1950s, John Wheeler pointed out that, on the Planck scale, quantum vacuum fluctuations would be so powerful that they would bend space-time into a sort of foamy structure – a frenetically shifting landscape of wormholes and bridges connecting different regions. Wheeler thought that, in place of a point-like singularity at a black hole’s centre, there should be a foamy blob. Topology change might also create a type of tunnel or wormhole linking the interior of a black hole with another universe or a distant region of our own universe, an idea first suggested by Wheeler and championed by several others. Inconvenient truth If that were the case, you could fall through a black hole and come out in a completely different space. Then there needn’t be an information paradox. The information about the infalling matter could simply traverse the wormhole and continue to exist in the other region of space-time. As long as we humans are restricted to “our” space-time region, information is lost, but taking a God’s-eye view, information would be conserved. The possibility that wormholes might connect the interior of black holes with another area of our own space-time outside the hole, allowing information to sneakily leak back out, is the basis of renewed claims recently that the black hole information paradox is close to resolution. But these calculations, as is so often the case, rely on highly idealised analogues of real black holes and involve layers of simplifying assumptions, so it isn’t clear how relevant they really are. please log in to view this image Stephen Hawking’s work laid bare the black hole paradox in the 1970s AFP via Getty Images There is a more general concern, too, about the uncritical application of quantum mechanics to the black hole evaporation process. Calculations tend to assume that the black hole and its products form an isolated system, which is obviously unrealistic. Quite apart from the disturbing effects of the rest of the universe, there is a fundamental question concerning what we mean by information. For information to be extracted from a quantum system, a measurement has to be performed by an external system. The very act of measurement breaks the time symmetry of quantum mechanics in a process sometimes described as the collapse of the wave function. So if “information” is treated as something that could actually be gleaned from a measurement performed on Hawking radiation, the rewind button is destroyed as soon as that measurement is made. The black hole information paradox is an inconvenient truth at the heart of physics, yet it has spurred a rich variety of theoretical investigations that have pushed the frontiers of the subject in important new directions. When Hawking announced his black hole evaporation result, it established a link between quantum mechanics, gravitation and thermodynamics. This is surely an important clue, and suggests that the resolution of the paradox – which is undoubtedly out there – lies in a revolution that unites our understanding of all three of those elements. Almost half a century on, however, we are still waiting for that revolution. It might take another Stephen Hawking to start it. New Scientist audio Articles with a headphones icon are available to listen to via our app mailto:newscientist.com/app More on these topics: ASTROPHYSICS BLACK HOLES
I've just got a shiver down my spine reading that. You are going on ignore, Duggie. I think you are possessed
I've got a story about seeing an old womans face. It was when I was renting my first flat. I was sat on the kitchen floor must have been around 3am or something like that. I seen a baby floating up the stairs towards me and as it got close it had the face was of an old woman, a bit like a witch with a few big what looked like warts on her face. It drifted past me and went into the living room. I slept in the kitchen that night and it took me weeks to be able to go in the living room again. It actually affected me quite badly for a little while. I had been up for over 30 hours taking ecstasy so I just put it down to that in the end
Unfortunately I have never been able to predict the the Lotto number as they are too random Or football matches because the referee or VAR will alway **** it up for me
I had a drink spiked with LSD once I spent four hours exploring every inch of our Solar System I did offer our version of NASA the info I had gathered but they did not seem interested, probably just thought I had been on a bad trip
I think I should be paid to post on our forum, I have kept everyone entertained for most of the day And I have only scratched the surface
