We’ll never be able to extract any information about what’s inside a black hole’s event horizon. Here’s why a singularity is inevitable.
Quantum superposition is not just a property of subatomic particles but also of the most massive objects in the universe. That is the conclusion of four theoretical physicists in Australia and Canada who calculated the hypothetical response of a particle detector placed some distance from a black hole. The researchers say the detector would see novel signs of superimposed space–times, implying that the black hole may have two different masses simultaneously.
Black holes are formed when extremely massive objects like stars collapse to a singularity – a point of infinite density. The gravitational field of a black hole is so great that nothing can escape its clutches, not even light. This creates a spherical region of space around the singularity entirely cut off from the rest of the universe and bounded by what is known as an event horizon.
An active area of research into the physics of black holes seeks to develop a consistent theory of quantum gravity. This is an important goal of theoretical physics that would reconcile quantum mechanics and Einstein’s general theory of relativity. In particular, by considering black holes in quantum superposition, physicists hope to gain insights into the quantum nature of space–time.
Perhaps Arthur C. Clarke was being uncharacteristically unambitious. He once pointed out that any sufficiently advanced technology is going to be indistinguishable from magic. If you dropped in on a bunch of Paleolithic farmers with your iPhone and a pair of sneakers, you’d undoubtedly seem pretty magical. But the contrast is only middling: The farmers would still recognize you as basically like them, and before long they’d be taking selfies. But what if life has moved so far on that it doesn’t just appear magical, but appears like physics?
After all, if the cosmos holds other life, and if some of that life has evolved beyond our own waypoints of complexity and technology, we should be considering some very extreme possibilities. Today’s futurists and believers in a machine “singularity” predict that life and its technological baggage might end up so beyond our ken that we wouldn’t even realize we were staring at it. That’s quite a claim, yet it would neatly explain why we have yet to see advanced intelligence in the cosmos around us, despite the sheer number of planets it could have arisen on—the so-called Fermi Paradox.
For example, if machines continue to grow exponentially in speed and sophistication, they will one day be able to decode the staggering complexity of the living world, from its atoms and molecules all the way up to entire planetary biomes. Presumably life doesn’t have to be made of atoms and molecules, but could be assembled from any set of building blocks with the requisite complexity. If so, a civilization could then transcribe itself and its entire physical realm into new forms. Indeed, perhaps our universe is one of the new forms into which some other civilization transcribed its world.
We explore the possibility that a new universe can be created by producing a small bubble of false vacuum. The initial bubble is small enough to be produced without an initial singularity, but classically it could not become a universe — instead it would reach a maximum radius and then collapse. We investigate the possibility that quantum effects allow the bubble to tunnel into a larger bubble, of the same mass, which would then classically evolve to become a new universe. The calculation of the tunneling amplitude is attempted, in lowest order semiclassical approximation (in the thin-wall limit), using both a canonical and a functional integral approach. The canonical approach is found to have flaws, attributable to our method of space-time slicing. The functional integral approach leads to a euclidean interpolating solution that is not a manifold. To describe it, we define an object which we call a “pseudomanifold”, and give a prescription to define its action. We conjecture that the tunneling probability to produce a new universe can be approximated using this action, and we show that this leads to a plausible result.
This time I come to talk about a new concept in this Age of Artificial Intelligence and the already insipid world of Social Networks. Initially, quite a few years ago, I named it “Counterpart” (long before the TV series “Counterpart” and “Black Mirror”, or even the movie “Transcendence”).
It was the essence of the ETER9 Project that was taking shape in my head.
Over the years and also with the evolution of technologies — and of the human being himself —, the concept “Counterpart” has been getting better and, with each passing day, it makes more sense!
Imagine a purely digital receptacle with the basics inside, like that Intermediate Software (BIOS(1)) that computers have between the Hardware and the Operating System. That receptacle waits for you. One way or another, it waits patiently for you, as if waiting for a Soul to come alive in the ether of digital existence.
Mark Rylance & Trudie Styler on AI, Singularity, Othering, Empathy, and Evolution.
Actor Mark Rylance and director/activist Trudie Styler sit down with Kyle Meredith to talk about Spark Hunter, a new audio drama about the world’s most advanced AI having dinner with her maker over a philosophical discussion to determine if she represents a new hope for the world, or its destruction. The two discuss how the Dalai Lama brought them together, what it means to have standing inside the laws of nature, and the points of othering, racism, empathy, and evolution that the spy-drama digs into. Rylance, who also starred in Ready Player One and Don’t Look Up, and Styler also consider if we’ll ever see singularity or if robots should even aspire to be more human, especially considering folks like Elon Musk and his actions.
Intelligence has evolved on an accelerating, exponential trendline to create a Sentience Singularity in the past, just like the progress of technology that followed it. The two are closely related, and form the first principles of futurism, and any attempt to make long-term predictions.
ATOM Chapter 1 : Prologue : https://atom.singularity2050.com/1-prologue.html.
Continue reading “The Sentience Singularity : The Evolutionary Trendline of Intelligence” »
In 1961 astronomers discovered a powerful x-ray source coming from the constellation Cygnus. Not knowing what it was, they named the source Cygnus X-1. It’s one of the strongest x-ray sources in the sky, and we now know it is powered by a stellar-mass black hole. Since it is only about 7,000 light-years away, it also gives astronomers an excellent view of how stellar-mass black holes behave. Even after six decades of study, it continues to teach us a few things, as a recent study in Science shows.
Cygnus X-1 is actually a binary system. The black hole itself is a 21 solar-mass stellar remnant, and it orbits a 41 solar-mass companion star. It’s a powerful x-ray source because material from the star is captured into an accretion disk of the black hole, which superheats the material and generates jets of plasma that flow away from the black hole. This is a common situation for black holes, but astronomers still don’t understand all the details of how this type of structure evolves.
For this study, the team used data from the Imaging X-Ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE), which can capture not just x-rays but also their polarization. When they combined this data with other observations of Cygnus X-1, they found the x-rays are emitted not from the regions along the jets, but from a 2,000 km region perpendicular to the jets. In other words, the accretion disk itself is the primary x-ray source. This supports the model where the innermost region of the accretion disk is what powers a black hole’s jets.
One small step for a machine… one giant leap for the singularity.
This AI actually improved a key algorithm that makes it run even faster.
