Stephen Hawking’s Final Theory
0593128443
Thomas Hertog
Notes
If a particle of light had a wristwatch, it wouldn’t tick at all.
The observable universe is limited, both in space and time, to the region with our past light cone. And given that only 13.8 billion years have elapsed since the big bang, this means there is a cosmological horizon, a limiting distance beyond which all happenings in the universe – or multiverse – lie truly out of reach, no matter how much telescope technology ever advances.
A universe in expansion has no center and no edge, for it is space itself that is stretching. If anything, the expansion is the explosion of space. “ The nebulae galaxies are like microbes on the surface of a balloon,” Lemaitre elaborated. “When the balloon increases, each microbe realizes that the others withdraw, and it has the impressions – and only the impression – of being at the centre.”…The story of the inflating universe is like that of a black hole turned inside out.
It is not that the big bang singularity sat there, like a cosmic egg, waiting to hatch a universe. The singularity rather signals the birth of time itself…In the case of an expanding universe, the time dimension is emergent. That is, history itself is holographically encrypted.
Quantum mechanics, for example, abandoned the old dream of scientific determinism, the idea that science should be able to make definite and precise predictions about the future course of events. The theory replaced that notion with the idea that we can only predict probabilities for different possible outcomes of measurements. Quantum mechanics holds that if one runs the exact same experiment over and over, one will, in general, not get the same results.
The basic problem is that the Anthropic Principle relies on the assumption – all too often swept under the carpet – that, in one way or another, we are typical (ideal) inhabitants of the universe.
His scheme says that to any given observer it appears as if other outcomes have vanished.
The storage capacity of black holes isn’t determined by their interior volume but by the area of the horizon surface. It is as if black holes do not have an interior but are holograms.
“Black holes are not eternal,” (Hawking) wrote. “They evaporate away at an increasing rate until they vanish in a gigantic explosion.”…He now proclaimed that when black holes grow old, surprisingly, much of the information about the hole and its history is no longer stored in the original black hole geometry but in a different space-time altogether… Whenever the antiparticle falls into the black hole, its partner particle can escape into the distant universe, where it shows up as Hawking radiation emitted by the hole.
Our perception of time is grounded by gravity, not entropy.
Gravity reduces entropy.
There are many universes.
Singularity and blackholes are the same event.
The momentum of matter sucked into a blackhole may create the force needed to create another big bang. If that is the case, the matter lost to the black hole becomes the matter that the new universe is made from.
Where is all the anti-matter? Where is the matter that is predicted to be there? Doubtful that dark matter, is as abundant as scientists speculate, and hidden matter in another universe.
Is there evidence that waves have hit an edge to the universe and reverberated back?
Is the speed of light a boundary or is that limit a fallacy?
Does the perception of time change as we move beyond the speed of light?
In a tree diagram, going from leaf to trunk is more efficient than going from trunk to leaf(s), particularly if your perspective is from the leaf.
This book is a willy-nilly history of astrophysics and quantum mechanics. The most interesting parts of this book are between the author and Stephen Hawking. Sadly, I can’t help but think that the relation was magnified, romanticized, and then exploited for the purposes of this book after Hawking’s death. That might be a wrong perspective – but is the impression that I get.