10-17-2010, 03:13 PM | #46 | |
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What you need to do is to say "IF my theory is correct, THEN the result would be..." ie, use your theory to make a prediction that is experimentally testable, and then propose an experiment to test it. That is science. The problem you'll face is that there are centuries of experiments which appear to indicate that the speed of light in vacuo is, in fact, constant. Among the simplest is something that you can do with any small telescope - time the mutual events of the Galilean satellites of Jupiter. The four major satellites of Jupiter all orbit in the plane of the planet's equator and are subject to a complex and ever-changing pattern of eclipses, occulations, transits of their shadows across the face of the planet, etc. These events can be easily predicted, but the time that we see them occur on Earth depends on long it takes the light to travel from Jupiter to us, which depends in turn on how far away Jupiter is from the Earth, something that's constantly changing as Jupiter and the Earth move in their respective orbits. Demonstrate convincingly that these events are not being seen "on schedule" due to a variable speed of light, and you've won a Nobel Prize for Physics. So really, Ralph, the ball's entirely in your court. If you think that Maxwell's equations are incorrect, make an experimentally verifiable prediction. |
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10-17-2010, 03:27 PM | #47 |
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If i remember correctly, Harry and Ralph, the speed of light changes in presence of a gravitational field, obviously associated to mass but not necessarily along the trajectory of the particular portion of the light wave field. So light that passes in the vicinity of the sun follows curved trajectories. This was demonstrated experimentally. Therefore is not in vacuo or not in vacuo the question, but in presence of a gravitational field. But maybe you are both physicists that do not like waves but particles.
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10-17-2010, 04:03 PM | #48 | |
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Although, however, the path of the light is changed, its speed is not. The speed of light is constant for all observers - that is the central tenet of relativity. |
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10-17-2010, 04:18 PM | #49 | |
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"Standard practice is: reviewers selected for their expertise and fluency in the chosen discipline are aware of all authors' names and affiliations, while authors are kept in the dark about the identity of their reviewers (although some journals allow them to request specific referees). The growing argument against this lopsided method is that knowledge of author's identity gender, nationality, research institution, level of experience in the field can (and does) bias reviewers' opinions on the merit of the research." |
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10-17-2010, 04:40 PM | #50 | |
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10-18-2010, 12:21 PM | #51 | |
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10-18-2010, 12:25 PM | #52 |
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Standard laws of physics do not apply inside a black hole. We just don't know...at least that's my understanding.
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10-18-2010, 12:38 PM | #53 |
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No. A photon that enters the event horizon of a black hole can never escape from it, because spacetime is not merely "curved" inside a black hole, but "disconnected" from the outside universe. There can be no transmission of information across the event horizon.
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10-18-2010, 12:44 PM | #54 |
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Black holes are actually pretty well understood. Physics "breaks down" at the singularity at the centre, but the large-scale characteristics of the object are pretty well understood. Objects have been discovered which are almost unquestionably black holes (most galaxies have a super-massive black hole at their core, for example), and which behave (to external view) just as physics says that they should do.
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10-18-2010, 12:47 PM | #55 |
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Harry that's true from an external perspective, but as I said (and you said) we don't know what happens inside because there is no information across the event horizon.
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10-18-2010, 12:52 PM | #56 |
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We can't see what happens inside, that's true. But the fact that our physical models of how black holes "work" produce a description of an object that behaves externally in the way that observed black holes work is a good indication that the theory is a reasonable approximation to the truth. Just as we can't see inside an atomic nucleus, but external observation allows us to be pretty confident of what's in there.
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10-18-2010, 01:07 PM | #57 |
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That's true. What we can tell matches.
But it's still like asking what's outside the universe/multiverse or what happened before the big bang. We really don't know....we can speculate, but... |
10-18-2010, 02:00 PM | #58 |
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What about those particle pairs that change to match each other, so if one goes left, the other goes right (or something like that) regardless of how far apart they are - would that not work if they were either side of an event horizon? If it did would that not be considered transmission of information?
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10-18-2010, 02:10 PM | #59 |
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Well of course there is Hawking radiation... That's pretty much you are talking about I think.
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10-18-2010, 02:22 PM | #60 |
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