Questions, Answers, Tips, and Ideas on topics of your choice.


QUESTION, ASK, DISCUSS AND BRAINSTORM!
'The ability to perceive or think differently is more important than the knowledge gained.'
(David Bohm)

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Saturday 24 April 2010

Hawking Radiation and Black Hole Evaporation.

Bekenstein-Hawking radiation questions.

'There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract physical description. It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature...'  "The philosophy of Niels Bohr" by Aage Petersen.

How does Hawking Radiation work?



In 1974, Stephen Hawking set forth a theory that due to quantum effects black holes should emit a thermal radiation with a black body spectrum. Actually, he drew on two soviet scientists’ work who claimed that rotating black holes should create and emit particles according to the quantum mechanical uncertainty principle. That means that black holes can lose mass and, if they spew out more matter than they gain, they might shrink, evaporate and eventually vanish.

This analysis is allegedly the first serious shot at a possible theory of quantum gravity, but there’s a catch — the existence of Hawking radiation hasn’t been proved so far. NASA launched a satellite to search for the expected gamma-ray flashes from the evaporating primordial black holes, and CERN’s Large Hadron Collider is bent on creating micro black holes in order to observe their evaporation, or that’s the part they let us in on.

Tuesday 6 April 2010

Casimir effect, vacuum fluctuations and zero-point energy.

Or what I make of it.

'Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex... It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.' Albert Einstein.

It turns out a great number of science lovers seek simple explanation of abstruse scientific topics rather than techno-babble and a pile of mind-bending equations. As one great physicist said, if you can’t break a complex scientific question down so that even your granddad understands it, you yourself don’t understand it.

First, to put it simply, classical mechanics deals with macroscopic objects, that is, things visible to the naked eye, while quantum mechanics deals with the wave-particle duality of atoms and molecules. That said, according to quantum field theory (quantum description of a physical field), the Casimir effect is a physical force produced by quantised field.