Original version With This story appeared in How much warehouse.
At the beginning of the time and the center of each black hole lies the point of infinite density called peculiarity. To explore these puzzles, we take what we know about space, time, gravity and quantum mechanics and apply them to a place where all these things simply fall apart. Perhaps there is nothing in the universe that questions the imagination more. Physicists still believe that if they manage to come up with a coherent explanation of what is actually happening in and around them, maybe something revealing will appear new understanding of what place space and time are.
At the end of the sixties, some physicists speculated that peculiarities could be surrounded by a region of chaos in which space and time accidentally grow and shrink. Charles Misner of the University of Maryland called him “Mixmaster Universe” after it was then Popular kitchen appliances line. If the astronaut fell into a black hole, “you can imagine that he mixes the body parts of the astronaut in a way that the mixture or eggs mix yolk and white eggs” Kip ThorneLater he wrote a physicist from the Nobel Prize.
Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which is used to describe the gravity of black holes, uses a single field equation to explain how the curves of space and matter move. But this equation uses Mathematical abbreviation called tensor To hide 16 separate, intertwined equations. Several scientists, including Misner, have developed useful simplified assumptions to allow them to examine the scripts such as the Mixmaster Universe.
Without these assumptions, Einstein’s equation cannot be solved analytically, and even with them was too complicated for the number simulations of those times. Like the device they were named after, these ideas were out of fashion. These “dynamics should be a very general phenomenon in gravity,” he said Gerben olingPhD researcher from the University of Edinburgh. “But this is something that has fallen from the map.”
Over the past few years, physicists have been returning to chaos around peculiarities thanks to recent mathematical tools. Their goals are double. One of the hopes is to show that the approximations made by Misner and others are significant approximates of the gravity of einsteinians. The second is to get closer to peculiarities in the hope that their extremes will lend a hand reconcile the general theory of relativity with quantum mechanics in the theory of quantum gravity, which has been the goal of physicists for over a century. How Sean Hartnoll From the University of Cambridge it is “time is ready for these ideas to be fully developed.”
Birth of the Chaos Mixmaster
Thorne described in the tardy 1960s as a “golden age” in Black Hole research. The term “black hole” has just started to utilize. In September 1969, during a visit to Moscow, Thorne received the manuscript of Evgena Lifshitz, an outstanding Ukrainian physicist. Together with Vladimir Belinski And Isaak Khalatkov, Lifschitz found a recent solution to Einstein’s gravity equations near the peculiarity, using the assumptions that three of them developed. Lifshitz was afraid that Soviet censors would delay the publication of the result because he denied the previous evidence he co -collaborated, so he asked Thorne to share him in the West.
Earlier models of the black hole assumed excellent symmetries that were not found in nature, for example, contributing that the star was the perfect ball before falling into a black hole or that she did not have a net electric charge. (These assumptions allowed to solve Einstein’s equations, in the simplest form, by Karl Schwarzschild Shortly after Einstein published them.) The solution found by Belinski, Khalatnikov and Lifschitz, which after the initials was called the BLK solution, described what could happen in a sloppy, more realistic situation in which black holes form from irregularly shaped objects. The result was not glossy stretching of space and time inside, but the roaring sea of space and time stretching and squeezing in many directions.
Thorne smuggled the article back to the United States and sent a copy to Misner, which he knew he was thinking similarly. It turned out that Misner and the Soviet group underestimated the same ideas, using similar assumptions and different techniques. What’s more, the BLK group “used it to solve the biggest unsolved problem of this era in mathematical relativity,” said Thorne, regarding the existence of the so -called “general” peculiarity. Belinski, the last surviving member of BKL Trio, recently told We -Mail that the living descriptions of Misner, in turn, helped him visualize the messy situation near the peculiarities that they both revealed.