Black Holes: The Assholes of the Universe
The other day the Science channel had a marathon of different shows like “How The Universe Works” and “Morgan Freeman's Through the Wormhole” on various aspects of cosmology. I watched a good bulk of the episodes, so I think it's safe to say I now qualify an expert on everything from supernovae to string theory. I'm a regular Neil deGrasse Tyson, bitches!
And in my freshly minted expert opinion, I must conclude that black holes are, in fact, the assholes of the universe.
Now, I don't mean that they are the opening from which the universe excretes it's fecal matter. That's the sort of thing someone who has been watching the Animal Planet or Discovery all day might say. (I watched Science. Just so we're clear.) If I was attempting to be metaphorical, they'd probably be the universe's mouths, since they consume much more than they emit. And in which case “Hawking radiation” would be the universe's vomit. (See, I told you I'm an expert now.)
I mean they are assholes in the sense of they are stupid little fucks who need to get their ass beat for being so cocky.
For instance, scientists think there's trillions of black holes out there, mocking us by staying invisible. Meanwhile, they are probably the number one thing we would WANT to see, since they are the weirdest, scariest things in existence.
These things aren't just holes in the universe, they are holes in reality itself. All logic breaks down inside them, so good luck trying to understand these fucking pricks if they aren't even going to follow the fucking rules.
I also learned how Stephen Hawking successfully trolled theoretical physics for 30 years when he proposed the “information paradox” which says all information (matter, energy, and the way they were oriented) is totally lost forever once it passes the event horizon. Everything sucked inside just disappears after the holes evaporate, just like they never existed. This idea not only undermined the basic laws of the physics, it undermined the law of cause and effect.
And did Hawking care? Did he think, “Damn, that can't be right. Maybe I'm overlooking something?” Nope. He just put it out there and let his detractors work on it themselves, while he just sat in his wheelchair giving them the troll face. Eventually someone came up with a way using string theory to show how information might be conserved, but it took Hawking several years before he admitted he was wrong.
Oh, but this other guy's theory isn't right either.
Hawking suggested that if there was a parallel dimension where the black hole didn't exist, then the information would still exist there. Problem solved, right? He had just forgotten to incorporate the improvable theory of parallel dimensions, that's all! Stephen Hawking may love physics, but he sure loves trolling even more.
So the question is still open as to whether or not black holes actually destroy information or not, but one thing we can be sure is that they're huge fucking assholes for making us wonder about it in the first place.
No one knows what exists beyond the event horizon or what the singularity really even is apart from the math they use to describe it's physical properties. It could literally be anything. For all we know, it's a picture of my dick. There could even be another universe in there, with lifeforms and such. Hell, maybe this universe is the singularity in the center of some black hole in another universe that's sitting on a turtle's shell. Your guess is as good as anyone at MIT's, it seems.
It's also impossible to know for sure what the true nature of black holes are, since no one has actually seen one, let alone seen one being born and even if we could send a probe light-years away, it couldn't get anywhere close to it before the gravity got so large it couldn't send transmissions anymore.
And what compounds the problem even further is that in order to understand what's going on at the singularity, we need both general relativity and quantum mechanics-- two theories that mix about as well as evolution and intelligent design. The singularity is said to be “infinitely dense” which somehow means it's some finite mass compressed into no volume. So it's something packed so tightly it takes up literally no space.
And this concept makes as much sense to the smartest astrophysicists as it does to anyone else. They just hope that the absurdity that is quantum mechanics probably has something to do with it. But for all they know, it very well may not. And there's no way to really verify it.
Seriously, fuck everything about these things.
Most of what we know about black holes are educated guesses based on math and some other principles in general relativity that have been, so far, verified. The theory as to how they are created is when a giant star much, much larger than our sun dies and go supernova, at which point its core becomes so fucking heavy that it literally breaks the shelf of reality that the star was sitting on and forms a black hole. This is why we can't have nice things.
Furthermore, despite all this crazy bullshit they put astrophysicists through when it comes to trying to understand these cosmic rule breakers, they only have, at most, three physical properties (but sometimes just one), so they're more easy to describe than something like a star or planet. It's like the universe is just trolling us with these things. Common.
***
There is a rule in life that the more your learn, the more you realize you don't know, and in no field of science is this fact more clear than in astrophysics. These scientists know more about how much we truly don't know more than anyone else, and yet they don't need to seek the security blanket of religion to shelter than from the emptiness of their own knowledge. I think that pretty heartening.
That's why I find it so crass for theists to arrogantly proclaim they have all the answers which came about, not through hundreds of years of logic and reason carried out by brilliant minds standing on the shoulders of other brilliant minds, but through their own primitive instincts they mistake as a mystical revelation. It takes away from the beauty of the natural process that is the culmination of billions of years of change to simply claim it was all done with ease by some magic man in the sky.
They'd have you believe that God created a universe filled with things than can utterly obliterate not just us, but all life, a million times over, in countless ways, (many of which we wouldn't even see coming) and He had us in mind when he set this all up. For 14 billion years He was busy creating super massive black holes, quasars, galaxies, and stars that go supernova-- all so we could live on the surface of a small rock mostly covered in a substance that drowns us and is plagued by frequent natural disasters. Basically, the universe is the insanely complex Rube Goldberg device build by an all powerful being just so he could create a few billion people he can torture for eternity if they use condoms.
Sounds legit to me.
And in my freshly minted expert opinion, I must conclude that black holes are, in fact, the assholes of the universe.
Now, I don't mean that they are the opening from which the universe excretes it's fecal matter. That's the sort of thing someone who has been watching the Animal Planet or Discovery all day might say. (I watched Science. Just so we're clear.) If I was attempting to be metaphorical, they'd probably be the universe's mouths, since they consume much more than they emit. And in which case “Hawking radiation” would be the universe's vomit. (See, I told you I'm an expert now.)
I mean they are assholes in the sense of they are stupid little fucks who need to get their ass beat for being so cocky.
For instance, scientists think there's trillions of black holes out there, mocking us by staying invisible. Meanwhile, they are probably the number one thing we would WANT to see, since they are the weirdest, scariest things in existence.
These things aren't just holes in the universe, they are holes in reality itself. All logic breaks down inside them, so good luck trying to understand these fucking pricks if they aren't even going to follow the fucking rules.
I also learned how Stephen Hawking successfully trolled theoretical physics for 30 years when he proposed the “information paradox” which says all information (matter, energy, and the way they were oriented) is totally lost forever once it passes the event horizon. Everything sucked inside just disappears after the holes evaporate, just like they never existed. This idea not only undermined the basic laws of the physics, it undermined the law of cause and effect.
And did Hawking care? Did he think, “Damn, that can't be right. Maybe I'm overlooking something?” Nope. He just put it out there and let his detractors work on it themselves, while he just sat in his wheelchair giving them the troll face. Eventually someone came up with a way using string theory to show how information might be conserved, but it took Hawking several years before he admitted he was wrong.
Oh, but this other guy's theory isn't right either.
Hawking suggested that if there was a parallel dimension where the black hole didn't exist, then the information would still exist there. Problem solved, right? He had just forgotten to incorporate the improvable theory of parallel dimensions, that's all! Stephen Hawking may love physics, but he sure loves trolling even more.
So the question is still open as to whether or not black holes actually destroy information or not, but one thing we can be sure is that they're huge fucking assholes for making us wonder about it in the first place.
No one knows what exists beyond the event horizon or what the singularity really even is apart from the math they use to describe it's physical properties. It could literally be anything. For all we know, it's a picture of my dick. There could even be another universe in there, with lifeforms and such. Hell, maybe this universe is the singularity in the center of some black hole in another universe that's sitting on a turtle's shell. Your guess is as good as anyone at MIT's, it seems.
It's also impossible to know for sure what the true nature of black holes are, since no one has actually seen one, let alone seen one being born and even if we could send a probe light-years away, it couldn't get anywhere close to it before the gravity got so large it couldn't send transmissions anymore.
And what compounds the problem even further is that in order to understand what's going on at the singularity, we need both general relativity and quantum mechanics-- two theories that mix about as well as evolution and intelligent design. The singularity is said to be “infinitely dense” which somehow means it's some finite mass compressed into no volume. So it's something packed so tightly it takes up literally no space.
And this concept makes as much sense to the smartest astrophysicists as it does to anyone else. They just hope that the absurdity that is quantum mechanics probably has something to do with it. But for all they know, it very well may not. And there's no way to really verify it.
Seriously, fuck everything about these things.
Most of what we know about black holes are educated guesses based on math and some other principles in general relativity that have been, so far, verified. The theory as to how they are created is when a giant star much, much larger than our sun dies and go supernova, at which point its core becomes so fucking heavy that it literally breaks the shelf of reality that the star was sitting on and forms a black hole. This is why we can't have nice things.
Furthermore, despite all this crazy bullshit they put astrophysicists through when it comes to trying to understand these cosmic rule breakers, they only have, at most, three physical properties (but sometimes just one), so they're more easy to describe than something like a star or planet. It's like the universe is just trolling us with these things. Common.
***
There is a rule in life that the more your learn, the more you realize you don't know, and in no field of science is this fact more clear than in astrophysics. These scientists know more about how much we truly don't know more than anyone else, and yet they don't need to seek the security blanket of religion to shelter than from the emptiness of their own knowledge. I think that pretty heartening.
That's why I find it so crass for theists to arrogantly proclaim they have all the answers which came about, not through hundreds of years of logic and reason carried out by brilliant minds standing on the shoulders of other brilliant minds, but through their own primitive instincts they mistake as a mystical revelation. It takes away from the beauty of the natural process that is the culmination of billions of years of change to simply claim it was all done with ease by some magic man in the sky.
They'd have you believe that God created a universe filled with things than can utterly obliterate not just us, but all life, a million times over, in countless ways, (many of which we wouldn't even see coming) and He had us in mind when he set this all up. For 14 billion years He was busy creating super massive black holes, quasars, galaxies, and stars that go supernova-- all so we could live on the surface of a small rock mostly covered in a substance that drowns us and is plagued by frequent natural disasters. Basically, the universe is the insanely complex Rube Goldberg device build by an all powerful being just so he could create a few billion people he can torture for eternity if they use condoms.
Sounds legit to me.
posted by Tserrof at 2:10 AM
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