And indeed, if VSL is correct, black holes may have very different properties than we thought. Collapsing stars could have a totally different demise and die a rather eccentric death.
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pg. 10Joao Magueijo
» Joao Magueijo - all quotes »
I'm sorry to disappoint science fiction fans, but if information is preserved, there is no possibility of using black holes to travel to other universes. If you jump into a black hole, your mass energy will be returned to our universe but in a mangled form which contains the information about what you were like but in a state where it can not be easily recognized. It is like burning an encyclopedia. Information is not lost, if one keeps the smoke and the ashes. But it is difficult to read. In practice, it would be too difficult to re-build a macroscopic object like an encyclopedia that fell inside a black hole from information in the radiation, but the information preserving result is important for microscopic processes involving virtual black holes.
Stephen Hawking
Is the reader feeling confused about the status of the black hole information paradox and black holes in general? So am I!
John (physicist) Moffat
In science [Anaxagoras] had great merit. It was he who first explained that the moon shines by reflected light... Anaxagoras gave the correct theory of eclipses, and knew that the moon was below the sun. The sun and stars, he said, are fiery stones, but we do not feel the heat of the stars because they are too distant. The sun is larger than the Peloponnesus. The moon has mountains, and (he thought) inhabitants.
Anaxagoras
While we talk, the sun is getting older. It will explode in 4.5 billion years. ... In comparison everything else seems insignificant. Wars, conflicts, political tension, shifts in opinion, philosophical debates, even passions—everything’s dead already if this infinite reserve from which you now draw energy to defer answers, if in short thought as a quest, dies out with the sun. ... The inevitable explosion to come, the one that’s always forgotten in your intellectual ploys, can be seen in a certain way as coming before the fact to render these ploys ... futile. ... In 4.5 billions years there will arrive the demise of your phenomenology and your utopian politics, and there’ll be no one there to toll the death knell or hear it. It will be too late to understand that your passionate, endless questioning always depended on a “life of the mind.” ... Thought borrows a horizon and orientation, the limitless limit and the end without end it assumes, from the corporeal, sensory, emotional and cognitive experience of a quite sophisticated but definitely earthly existence. With the disappearance of the earth, thought will have stopped—leaving that disappearance absolutely unthought of. ... The death of the sun is a death of mind. ... There’s no sublation or deferral if nothing survives. ... The sun, our earth, and your thought will have been no more than a spasmodic state of energy, an instant of established order, a smile on the surface of matter in a remote corned of the cosmos. ... Human death is included in the life of the mind. Solar death implies an irreparably exclusive disjunction between death and thought: if there’s death, then there’s no thought.
Jean-Francois Lyotard
People think I'm eccentric, cranky. If I'm eccentric because I've never been into mainstream things, then I am eccentric.
Van Morrison
Magueijo, Joao
Mahaffy, John Pentland
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