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This does not jibe with my understanding, limited as it is. There is equivalence between matter and energy but not gravity and energy as gravity is a fundemental force. If I stretch the bands of a sling-shot for example, I have stored potential energy, but neither me nor the slingshot components are energy.CShark wrote:Monk, what do you define as 'energy' ? If is the ability to do work, then is gravity not energy, and as we know, the big G certainly does warp space...so...we're going around and around this one.
That's beyond my feeble ability to visualize.One of the more interesting ideas is that a black hole does not exist in our universe, but is something of a tear in space/time. This would account for it's nearly infinite mass yet small size...it's mass is actually somewhere other than in our space...
Unless I'm getting my wires completely crossed I suspect this might be to do with Hawking radiation - where a particle creates its own antiparticle, except when this occurs at or near an event horizon one falls in and the other is expelled. Er...Forum Monk wrote:I haven't heard this. It brings up interesting questions about the theoretical lifetimes of these objects, however. How old can a black hole be and if keeps gobbling mass does it continue to enlarge or does the mechanism you described keep it in check?War Arrow wrote:it is my understanding that one current theory pertaining to black holes is that their mass gradually decreases over time due to their absorbing some particle or other which has negative mass, thus resulting in the bizzare idea that adding negative mass decreases positive mass (bizarre in terms of reality behaving exactly like maths in this instance, I guess).
In physics, Hawking radiation (also known as Bekenstein-Hawking radiation) is a thermal radiation with a black body spectrum predicted to be emitted by black holes due to quantum effects. It is named after the physicist Stephen Hawking who provided the theoretical argument for its existence in 1974, and sometimes also after the physicist Jacob Bekenstein who predicted that black holes should have a finite, non-zero temperature and entropy.
Because Hawking radiation allows black holes to lose mass, black holes which lose more matter than they gain through other means are expected to evaporate, shrink, and ultimately vanish. Smaller 'micro' black holes [MBHs] are currently predicted by theory to be larger net emitters of radiation than larger black holes, and to shrink and evaporate faster.
Hawking's analysis became the first convincing insight into a possible theory of quantum gravity. However, the existence of Hawking radiation has never been observed, nor are there currently viable experimental tests which would allow it to be observed. Hence there is still some theoretical dispute over whether Hawking radiation actually exists. However, the GLAST satellite to be launched by NASA in Spring, 2008 will be able to search for evaporating primordial black holes. In speculative large extra dimension theories, CERN's Large Hadron Collider may be able to create micro black holes and observe their evaporation [1][2][3].
Ground based observatories, such as the Pierre Auger, might also be capable of detecting evaporating MBHs that would form in the upper atmosphere by the impact of high-speed protons, also known as cosmic rays. Recent results [4] from the Pierre Auger now suggest that the highest energy protons (with energies of 1x1020 eV or higher) originate from nearby active galactic nuclei (AGN) where they are accelerated and travel to earth for hundreds of millions of years at nearly the speed of light, and upon impact might create MBHs, allowing for observation of their evaporation.
