 |
| Merging of two black holes |
In December
2013 several media made reference to an article published in the journal
Physical Review Letters, in the field called quantum
gravity, a set of mutually incompatible theories that in the
last 30 years have scarcely formulated a single testable prediction, although
they are usually presented as the latest in physics and give rise to news
broadly popularized by the general media. This scientific news was presented by
some media
with this title: quantum entanglement causes the appearance
of wormholes. Some of the reviews contained important mistakes.
I’ll cite two:
1. The group showed that, by creating
two black holes intertwined, later separated, a wormhole appeared, a “shortcut”'
through the universe, connecting the two distant black holes to one another.
Comment: the group did not show that. It just
found some equations that suggest that this might happen (or not, because
mathematics is not the same as physics). Moreover, these theoretical
speculations are based on string theory, which is just one among several
alternative proposals of quantum gravity existing today.
2. To explore what emerges from two
entangled quarks, Sonner first generated quarks using the Schwinger effect - a
concept in quantum theory that enables the creation of particles out of
nothing. More precisely, the effect, also called "pair creation,"
allows two particles to emerge from a vacuum.
 |
| Julian Schwinger, Nobel Price 1965 |
Two comments.
First: Sonner did not generate anything, because the
Schwinger effect has not yet been experimentally verified, even with
electron-positron pairs, much less with quarks, so again we have the confusion
of a mere theoretical study with something real. What Sonner really did was assume
that the Schwinger effect is real, and that it can be used to generate quarks
in a vacuum, in which case certain equations (which have not been proven) say
that something could happen... As you see, this study is literally resting on the void.
Second: out of nothing
one can create nothing. Nothing does
not exist, as we know since the time of Parmenides. As usual, nothing is confused with the vacuum. A vacuum
is not nothing, because it has several
qualities (space, time, energy, existence) that nothing
does not have.
 |
| Black hole at the center of a galaxy |
Our current
theories about quantum vacuum cannot be wholly correct, for they predict that
the energy of the vacuum is infinite. Physicists solve this problem by a
mathematical procedure called renormalization, a process that
essentially involves dividing by infinity (which is forbidden by mathematics), equivalent
to hiding the problem under the carpet.
One must be
careful with scientific news appearing in the press. Some media are just
looking for a headline impact. The accuracy of the scientific news, which perhaps
ultimately may just be simple speculations, is usually less important.
Manuel Alfonseca
No comments:
Post a Comment