Comments on: Holes of Silence

By: Cheryl’s Mewsings » Blog Archive » Scientists Create Black Hole

Cheryl’s Mewsings » Blog Archive » Scientists Create Black Hole — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 09:33:47 +0000

[...] it, so it is serious stuff. Jennifer Ouellette has an introductory post here, and Sean Carroll wonders about the possibility of observing Hawking [...]

By: ScienceBlogs Channel : Physical Science | BlogCABLE.COM

ScienceBlogs Channel : Physical Science | BlogCABLE.COM — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 12:48:12 +0000

[...] It’s an interesting result– how important it really is for understanding high-temperature superconductivity, it’s hard for me to say, but it merited publication in Science, so it’s pretty significant. Does it demonstrate the physical reality of string theory? My take on that is pretty similar to something Sean wrote a while back: [...]

By: pi

pi — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 06:47:41 +0000

interesting, fact is they did one in haifa and didn’t have hawking radiation, neither evaporated, and it was done only with 10.000 atoms in
bosonic state. now they are going to mass strong force quarks at cern
hundreds of thousands. If they become a boson, their strong force, 100
times stronger than the electroweak force at haifa, will create a sucking hole 100^3 times faster in its absorbition. Speed of sound x 100^3=speed
of light. Thus a quark hole is actually a black hole and will be created
at cern and will not evaporate.
interesting haifa has proved that a boson quark hole will be a black hole
and it will not evaporate and it will be made at cern
interesting nobody has thought of this at cern?

By: tachyon

tachyon — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 14:52:25 +0000

"Of course there is no problem in having something go faster than sound, but sound waves themselves are stuck with that speed limit." hmmm... "Of course there is no problem in having something go faster than light but light waves themselves are stuck with that speed limit." Might we hope?

By: Dunner's: Miscellaneous Links (18 June 2009)

Dunner's: Miscellaneous Links (18 June 2009) — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 14:49:36 +0000

[...] Globular Cluster of Stars (One of the better pictures I’ve seen of M13.)NGC 6240: Merging GalaxiesDiscovery Magazine: Holes of Silence (Sonic black holes. Cool!)Science @ NASA: Mystery of the Missing Sunspots, Solved?Climate change is [...]

By: Fourteener

Fourteener — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 19:55:02 +0000

Is this really, truly, an example of sound science?

In order to actually read the post, I had to wait for a Templeton Foundation ad to get out of the way. Folk wisdom has often noted that he who pays the piper calls the tune.

By: Marshall Eubanks

Marshall Eubanks — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 08:48:09 +0000

I think that the proper analogue for black hole would be “silent hole.” It’s not that it’s not speaking, it’s that it can’t be heard.

By: Gavin Polhemus

Gavin Polhemus — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 17:50:02 +0000

“Anechoic hole” is what I’d call it.

Brian, It is fairly easy to produce one of these in a Fox News studio. We need to place a nozzle in the studio and then suck air out of the studio a super sonic speed. As air approaches the nozzle it will accelerate past the speed of sound. The place where the flow becomes super sonic is the horizon of the anechoic hole (dumb hole, whatever). As long as the commentator is within the horizon, the desired affect will be achieved.

Of course, that is just the theory. It still needs experimental verification. I hope you can find funding to do this valuable research.

By: brian

brian — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 15:26:59 +0000

how do we get one of these dumb holes into Fox New’s studio?

By: Adam

Adam — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 19:58:01 +0000

Does the interior geometry of a Mute Hole form a Cone of Silence as it collapses towards an acoustic Singularity?

Had to chuck in that reference. But as for ‘ether’ there was a “Scientific American” article about the prospects for acoustic black-holes and how they might imply an ‘ether’ for space-time structure after all. But it won’t be a 19th Century style ether – it’ll respect Lorentz invariance for starters.

By: Fermi-Walker Public Transport

Fermi-Walker Public Transport — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 12:54:34 +0000

Lab Lemming @9 Only if they are also submitted to the ArXiv preprint server.

By: Lab Lemming

Lab Lemming — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 02:35:55 +0000

If you submit these results to Nature, would they make a sound?

By: Clerk

Clerk — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 00:13:32 +0000

Wow… what a cool concept! I once heard Hawking make a joke on tv along the lines of. The discovery of Hawking radiation would surely win him the Noble Prize, but we will never get that close to a black hole to observe it, guaranteeing him to never win the prize. If this does progress and they do in fact observe Hawking radiation, will he get it?! …Wow… what a cool concept!

By: Low Math, Meekly Interacting

Low Math, Meekly Interacting — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 21:58:40 +0000

The Hawking radiation angle makes me wonder (not that I expect the answers have been worked out):

Unlike Hawking radiation, which propagates in a vacuum, phonons would need some medium (presumably the condensate itself). I guess that means, unlike with relativity, phonons exist in an “ether” or a fixed frame of reference. Does that detract from the relevance of the physical analogy?

Black holes have to get very small before they’re hot enough to detect. Presumably the “temperature” (or should I say loudness?) of a dumb hole increases as the size decreases as well. How small would the hole have to get before it started emitting detectable amounts of phonons? How big would those phonons be in relation to the hole? Could you get a phonon emitted with a wavelength bigger than the hole? That would be pretty wild. Since the hole is made of (highly smeared) ions or atoms, does granularity become a problem as the hole shrinks to the point where it emits prodigious Hawking radiation?

Very cool stuff…

By: Kernal

Kernal — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 21:48:49 +0000

Experimental Black Hole models have also been investigated by using surface plasmons on a sheet with some irregularity (drop of some liquid or a peak, etc). The best part is that punching a hole in the sheet then mimics a wormhole, connecting the otherwise separated sides of the sheet.

By: Ellipsis

Ellipsis — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 21:34:32 +0000

It also might be interesting to collide/merge two of them. (I wonder how one of these holes would interact with a second one.) Would detectable sound waves be emitted?

By: rob

rob — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 21:03:34 +0000

I’ve always thought “mute hole” had a better ring to it, and it’s certainly more PC.

By: Phillip Helbig

Phillip Helbig — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 20:17:24 +0000

By coincidence, this object (dumb hole) was mentioned in s.p.r recently:

http://groups.google.de/group/sci.physics.research/msg/3330508760695218?hl=de&dmode=source

By: Phillip Helbig

Phillip Helbig — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 20:13:21 +0000

Note that this is Ori Lahav, not the famous astronomer Ofer Lahav.

I’m sure Simon D. M. White would be amused. Yes, there’s another astronomer
Simon. D. White without the M. Thus, Simon White’s use of two middle initials
is justified to avoid confusion. (I wonder if the M. really stands for a third “first name”
or was just invented to make literature references unambiguous, possibly with a nod
to “dark matter” since Simon White was quite important in pointing out the need for
dark matter in cosmology from a theoretical perspective.)

By: Doug

Doug — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 19:46:08 +0000

There’s also the old idea that if you get a massive enough star undergoing core collapse, the collapse speed of the material around the core could be faster than the speed of the rebound pressure wave, preventing a supernova.