Doc Bill
Posts: 1039
Joined: April 2007
|
I vowed not to return but since I'm the only person on this thread with a PhD from a reputable university I will step in on this point.
Yes, TP, it was a test and you failed miserably. You see, the Internet has a lot of stuff on it but it doesn't have all the stuff. Us old geezers used paper and pencils in the last century and much has not been digitized and made available over the Web.
Henderson did a sabbatical at Cambridge in the 60's where he met a young physicist, Stephen Hawking. Henderson was working on quantum fluctuations associated with interstellar gasses and it was Hawking who introduced Henderson to the mathematics that would lead to the characterization of black holes.
It turns out that Darling, also working at Cornell with Henderson, was finishing his PhD dissertation on mass balance of interstellar gasses, and, although his data was accurate he was concerned that it wasn't accurate enough. Something else was going on and Henderson, via Hawking, provided a clue, and that was quantum oscillation.
Quantum oscillation called for "tunneling" between energy potential wells in interstellar space. Remember, at this time tunneling was a new concept which was later demonstrated and is the basis for things like solid-state lasers.
Penrose's concern was that there was not an energy source that could drive tunneling in interstellar space. The distances between particles was great, it was nearly zero Kelvin and calculations could not deliver the heat, so to speak. Enter Hawking and black holes. Suddenly it all dropped out. Small black holes, on the order of a solar mass or less, but more prevalent in interstellar space, especially where there were large dust accumulations, such as nebula, could not only provide the power for oscillations, but the mass balance calculations all but proved the concept.
Of course, identifying small black holes has been a problem, and that may always be the case, and that's Penrose's concern, however, the math solves the mass balance problem.
So, the search is on for small (some people call them micro) black holes and time will tell.
An interesting side note is that the new supercollider being built has as an objective to create a micro-micro black hole. The sponsors of that project are none other than Henderson and Darling.
Pretty cool, eh?
|
