Dr. rer. nat. habil. Norbert Schwarzer's Annus mirabilis Year - Interview No2
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Recent Interview on Deriving Hawking Radiation with Dr. rer. nat. habil. N. Schwarzer (physicist)
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Troy: Norbert, you recently wrote a paper deriving the Hawking radiation from the Quantum Einstein Field equations. Blackholes have been all over the news recently, including Hawking radiation. What is Hawking radiation?
Norbert: If you calculate black holes in a quantum gravity manner you suddenly find that what was a quasi static or static object – namely the black hole, is something which makes the space time around itself to permanently jitter in extremely high frequencies. So it is like, the object is full of fear, maybe it just fears to be discovered as what it truly is, namely just a fearful object. This jitter is immense, it stores all the energy and the mass of the object. Maybe the object is just this oscillation ensemble, with many frequencies by the way. And some of these oscillations can just be combined to get the nature of waves.
Troy: And what about all this discussion (hairy strings etc.) about information escaping a black hole or not?
Norbert: This is something else that we can cover in more detail at a later time. Information goes out too because the internal structure of the blackhole determines its possibility to radiate outwards or inwards, but the important thing is that these oscillations, purely mathematically (and for this I can give you a falsifiable paper which is the Hawking Radiation I recently wrote) can be combined to waves, or they combine themselves to waves, which are of ingoing and outgoing character. An outgoing wave takes with it, what?
Troy: information?
Norbert: Energy and mass. Energy = Mass. And of course, yes, information. Sometimes it’s not more than the information, “Hey, I’m coming from this or that black hole”. And it is full of fear that somebody might find out what it truly is. And maybe we have just received this information and now also the readers did, so the black hole jitters even more now.
Troy: Does the receiver of the information also start to feel or sense the jitter?
Norbert: Yes, they sense it! The frequency is so high that we can’t really detect it with any existing detectors, but it is there. Space -time around a blackhole jitters. Even for a blackhole which would be of the size of the earth, becoming a blackhole that is just eleven millimeters, the jitter is so immense and of such a high frequency that it is ... just wow! But, as said, some of these oscillations combined to waves and we have ingoing and outgoing waves, and the outgoing ones take away energy and mass from the blackhole.
Unfortunately, the thing is not burning up by radiating waves outside because there is more stuff coming in. The temperature of the universe is too high to cool down all those bigger blackholes, to make them eat themselves up or radiate themselves away.
So again what is the nature of the radiation?
The character of this radiation is just the oscillations around the blackhole, they can become or do combine to waves, and some of the waves are outgoing waves and that’s then the radiation.
Troy: So what does this mean or in general, where could we apply it? Is it useful for us to know this stuff?
Norbert: The knowledge is useful because, and as you already hinted, with the energy and the mass going away with the radiation going outwards, information is being carried away too. And as we can show with the quantum gravity approach that this is so general, so fundamental, that not even blackholes can ever even think about trapping information forever, we know that there is no such thing as the perfect information prison. It is absolutely clear, it directly follows from there that there is no way to ever trap, internally, forever, ideas and thoughts.
There is no way to ever construct a true stable lasting thought prison.
The thought is always freer than the man thinking it!
Troy: So, it’s like our universes first amendment, or freedom of speech.
Norbert: Exactly, wow! The universes first amendment is 'information is free', and if you try to trap it, you’ll fail. Or as the Borg’s (Startrek) said, trapping information is futile, or rather they said “resistance in futile”, but in this case it is information being free.
Troy: So that statement then means that blockholes don’t necessarily have to be constrained to a physical phenomenon!
Norbert: Of course not. Because a true quantum gravity theory (it’s not for nothing also being called a theory of everything), just holds for all ensembles of attributes, properties, degrees of freedoms and these are just dimensions. So, whether I take a blackhole in the universe and say this is the space and time combined forming blackholes, I could also take any another collections of properties, attributes, maybe of the financial market, maybe of the human society, with its richness, population density, good and evil (on a certain scale), whatever it is, and adding some time, then I have attributes describing the society and they can of course also form blackholes in a way that somebody tries to construct a mind trap.
Troy: Or self-constructs an unintentional mind trap.
Norbert: Yes, exactly. And this is important, the right mind (and with ‘right’ I do not mean direction, I mean the properly organised mind), the thought is always freer than the thinker. If you trap yourself, however, constrain yourself, well then things could just be different. Then you only think you are free.
Troy: Wow, that is a lot to process.
Norbert (laughing): Process it well then!