Almost everyone who is interested enough to follow scientific developments is familiar with the good old “Black Hole” in space. This is what happens when massive stars collapse in on themselves and there’s nothing to stop it. Eventually all the mass gets crushed to infinite (or near infinite) density, creating a “Singularity.” This tiny point in spacetime exerts all the gravity of all the mass that became part of it, so their effects can be observed on other stars and matter near them.*

[* High energy physicists have suggested that singularities can come in much smaller 'mini' and 'micro' size, and are hoping to produce one at CERN if they ever get the Large Hadron Collider going.]

These black holes are said to be hidden behind an event horizon, where matter and energy being sucked in toward the singularity exceeds the speed of light. Beyond that boundary of spacetime, nothing within can ever get out again. Roger Penrose came up with the Cosmic Censorship hypothesis back in the ’70s when he and Stephen Hawking were formalizing the solutions to Einstein’s equations that predicted the existence of black holes. It seemed ‘indecent’ to Penrose that a singularity might ever exist that was not shielded from outside view by an event horizon, and that view predominated research for decades despite whispers here and there that naked singularities could indeed exist.

The axiom of cosmic censorship is that “Nature abhors a naked singularity.” Penrose complains that an indecent singularity would do some very strange things to time, making mincemeat of our notions of cause and effect. Three decades later theorists are not so sure. It was reported back in September of 2007 that…

Some Black Holes May Not Be Black – researchers from Duke University and Cambridge published in the journal Physical Review D their solutions to the equations of general relativity which predict the existence of naked singularities. Worse, they came up with some ways of testing the gravitational lensing and radiation emissions expected from such a phenomenon, that could soon be observed with current and new technology.

In the February issue of Scientific American, theorist Pankaj Joshi writes an informative 5 pages of explanation in the article -

Do Naked Singularities Break the Rules of Physics?

“If naked singularities exist, the implications would be enormous and would touch on nearly every aspect of astrophysics and fundamental physics. The lack of horizons could mean that mysterious processes occurring near the singularities would impinge on the outside world. Naked singularities might account for unexplained high-energy phenomena that astronomers have seen, and they might offer a laboratory to explore the fabric of spacetime on its finest scales.”

Some astrophysicists are probably dreading the implications, but it looks like an increasing number of others are quite excited about it as a way forward in their quest to understand the true nature of space and time and the behaviors of all things existing here. Joshi concludes his article with this enthusiasm…

“Either proving or disproving cosmic censorship would create a mini explosion of its own within physics, because naked singularities touch on so many deep aspects of current theories. What comes out unambiguously from the theoretical work so far is that censorship does not hold in an unqualified form, as it is sometimes taken to be. Singularities are clothed only if the conditions are suitable. The question remains whether these conditions could ever arise in nature. If they can, then physicists will surely come to love what they once feared.”

Links:

Wiki: Naked singularity
Do Naked Singularities Break the Rules of Physics?
Some Black Holes May Not Be Black

Researchers at Cardiff University have managed to confirm a prediction made before the British-German gravity wave detector GEO600 was up and running, and it just might open up a whole new era in fundamental physics.

The press release Cardiff researchers could herald a new era explains that the GEO600 detector has been receiving some mysterious ‘noise’ that might confirm that the true nature of the universe is holographic, as predicted by physicist Craig Hogan at Fermilab. The GEO600 team is now gearing toward further experiments that may lend further evidence in favor of this theory. New Scientist has a more in-depth article, Our world may be a giant hologram that fleshes out the concepts.

Physicists have long hypothesized that the universe is ‘grainy’ at the Planck level, which is the smallest conceptual unit of space and time. Scientists cannot hope ever to measure phenomena at that level, but if the universe is a hologram projected from those tiny “grains of sand” they may well be able to detect levels of the projection as far into the high energy/small size range as they can ever go. That projection, Hogan maintains, is the source of the noise in the detector.

Holograms are created by a special photographic process where an object is bathed in the light of a laser, then a second laser is bounced off the reflected light of the first, and the interference pattern is captured on film. When that image (which looks like a meaningless swirl of light) is illuminated by yet another polarized light source, a 3-dimensional image of the original appears. It is basically the famous double-slit effect, making specific use of the interference pattern of the light. Apart from the 3-dimensional projection, holograms are remarkable in that no matter how you subdivide them, each piece contains all the information contained in the whole. The images just get smaller with each division. Every part contains the whole.

The GEO600 detector is designed to make use of measurements made with a split-beam of polarized light at right angles to detect the tiniest changes as gravity waves pass through the earth. Those changes would show up as interference patterns of the light, thus the experiment has something in common with the process of creating and projecting holograms. That the experiment is detecting ‘noise’ – interference patterns in the light that do not indicate gravity waves – is a confirmation of the holographic universe model, Hogan says.

The GEO600 team will now attempt to fine-tune the detector to higher and higher wavelengths to see if the noise disappears at a certain level. Hogan has proposed a new experiment using an atom interferometer. These work on the same principle as laser-based detectors but instead of light they use beams of ultracold atoms.

Discovery of unexpected noise by a Bell Labs antenna in 1964 confirmed the cosmic microwave background radiation, leading to general acceptance of the Big Bang theory. This new noise could lead to a historical re-vamping of our understanding of the universe as well, so keep an eye on the GEO600 experiments!

Links:

Cardiff researchers could herald a new era
Our world may be a giant hologram
Wikipedia: Holographic principle