What moves all those researchers is his desire to emulate Mr. Einstein, the tribal idol of XX century Physics. Now Mr. Einstein had indeed many defects. He was not exactly a nice guy. He gave his first son on adoption and did not even mentioned him in his autobiography; he told his wife that women only reproduce ideas when she, a competent physicist, tried to help Einstein on his work, etc. etc. But certainly Einstein did not need to make 8 billion dollar experiments to find out his equations, but made ‘thought experiments’ as he knew perfectly that physics is basically a mathematical description of the Universe and once enough data had been recollected, and we have indeed enough data, no amount of experiments will substitute the hardcore work of resolving and simplifying the mathematical equations that explain the Universe. The problem of those particle physicists is that they don’t seem to have the mental power to resolve and simplify further what Einstein had achieved, so they fancy with the idea that Mr. Einstein was wrong and they are right, just because they want badly to occupy his notch. This arrogant sense of emulation is especially obvious in Mr. Hawking, the wannabe genius that CERN considers the oracle which all human beings have to trust in this matter.
Indeed, Hawking’s sets himself in his famed article also to a task beyond his capacity: to marry quantum theory and relativity outdoing the master Einstein by substituting his solid work for his speculations. In fact, the 1977 article () starts with Einstein’s famed quote that ‘God does not play dice’, which Mr. Hawking will dismiss in his failed attempt to refound modern physics at the end of the article affirming that ‘God not only plays dice but sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen’ (in the interior of the black hole). The ambition of the article is self-evident, Mr. Hawking is about to tamper with quantum mechanics, Relativity and Thermodynamics, the 3 pillars of western science in order to create his own branch of what some ironic physicists call ‘Hawking’s Physics’…
Indeed, from the beginning of his article Mr. Hawking leads us with astonishing ‘chuptzah’ to where he wants to arrive. If black holes evaporate, Einstein is wrong, because his General Relativity affirms that no energy or matter below the speed of light can abandon a black hole. Again quoting Mr. Hawking on that article’s first page: ‘According to the special theory of relativity nothing can travel faster than light, so that if light cannot escape nothing else an either. The result would be a black hole, a region of space-time from which it is not possible to escape.’ But he is going to prove Einstein wrong very soon with Hawking’s physics. To that aim he makes an analogy between 2 concepts that have no relation whatsoever in ‘classic physics’: the surface area of the black hole and the temperature of an object, breaking one of the fundamental laws of serious science: ‘analogies are not homologies and hence can never be adduced to draw conclusions upon the equality of two facts of nature’. Let us put one simple example. The similarity between the bat’s wings, the bird’s wings and the plane wings is an analogy. They look analog because they have similar uses, they are all tools for flying. But that fact doesn’t mean that birds, bats and planes are homologous, are the same thing and proceed from the same ancestor.
Now the area of a physical object is a static, spatial concept which easily applies to black holes. The temperature of an object however has nothing to do with the area. Certainly is not an homology and many would say not even an analogy. But Hawking’s decides that because the black hole area increases constantly as the black hole grows in mass (in the same way a new baby grows in mass as he eats more), and the entropy (or temperature disorder of the Universe) also grows constantly, both things are the same. This is total nonsense. All things die certainly at the end of life and that doesn’t mean they are the same. Birds, bats and planes also become disordered as time passes and yet nobody would think that their processes are the same, or even that they eat the same fuel. And yet based in that analogy Mr. Hawking and those who followed on the path of his speculative science, deduced that as hot bodies release heat and energy, black hole surfaces had to release also energy and evaporate. And so they have to be very hot.
Birds do not transport passengers even if they have wings like planes do and black holes do not need to release energy even if they have an area that increases with time as entropy does. Mr. Hawking himself affirms in the article: ‘although there is clearly a similarity between entropy and the area of the black hole horizon it was not obvious to us how the area could be identified as the entropy of a black hole.’
Still, though the analogy doesn’t hold, Mr. hawking needs it because temperature is a quantum effect he can study with quantum equations and the area of the black hole is a spatial effect that he has to study with Einstein’s Relativity and hence could not marry both effects together.
But we will be generous here and concede the analogy, as we have conceded it through the text, warning the readers of its truly meaning. What the analogy means is that a small black hole is hyper-active because his gravitational field cancels around the strong force, the Russian doll cover of the proton, and feeds on its inner quarks as boiling water peels off a tomato and allows you to eat the interior. Son in a sense, we concede that black holes are hyper-active, and accept the analogy as a working simplified method of explaining to you what happens next, according to Einstein and Hawking (through his analogy): the black hole increases his area as it expands its gravitational force in our universe. This Hawking’s concedes without realizing that he is breaking another basic logic law of true science. If A implies B then A doesn’t imply non-B.
It is what a high school student knows as ‘reductio ad absurdum’. Indeed, Hawking invents here an absurd argument, as he affirms that black holes grow constantly in volume and area, which means they are feeding ‘growing, in size’; and yet he affirms that black holes evaporate; that is, they ‘diminish in size’… Hence if you believe in logic, the backbone of all sciences, either black holes do grow constantly in size as entropy does, and so they don’t evaporate but feed as Einstein says, or they evaporate and so Mr. Hawking own 1st law of black holes, the unrelentless growth of their area is false… What they cannot do except in pathological physics is to grow in size and evaporate at the same time, as we cannot live and die at the same time, and white is not black and red is not blue and A is not B but A.
Of course Einstein is not God, but the Greeks called God, Logos, the Logic of the Universe and here we find a man who plays to reinvent the Universe. Of course we want to go beyond Einstein… But most of us merely became humbled when learning the complex equations of Mr. Einstein and tried at best to simplify and correct his equations, not to throw them to the garbage with 100 years of serious science behind (3). Not so Mr. Hawking who can wrestle with the Logic of the Gods, like a Quixote tumbling wind mills that never fall except in his imagination…
Of course he is fair so he doubts of himself, sort of apologizing for his bad physics, which might look to you a nice fellow attitude but has nothing to do with the search of truth, which is either A and B but not A perhaps, if…
Not so in Hawking’s mind, ambivalent between brashness and apology, when he affirms: ‘according to classical concepts no such (thermodynamic) equilibrium is possible, since the black hole would absorb any thermal radiation that fell on it and by (General Relativity’s) definition would not be able to emit anything in return’…
Yet he is not convinced since he is in words of his best friend Mr. Thorne () ‘the most stubborn man I ever known’… and his goal is obvious: to put aside General Relativity and bring in quantum theory, studying black holes with the temperature analogy instead of doing it with the gravity field as everybody else does since Einstein, Schwarzschild, Chandra and Oppenheimer discovered them theoretically.
Problem is that quantum theory and temperature are theories that study electromagnetic particles and fields unrelated till date to gravitational fields and general relativity the classic theories that explain black holes. So in the same way we do not use sociology, a theory about human beings, to study the behavior of electrons, for whom we have quantum theory, we shouldn’t use quantum theory to study black holes, for whom we have general relativity… Mr. Einstein himself tried unsuccessfully as many of us have tried after him, to marry quantum theory and relativity (in the opposite way to that of Hawking’s obviously, departing not from quantum theory but from Relativity).
But Mr. Hawking, well known by his iconoclastic remarks, is about to do it in his article. And so he studies quantum effects around the black hole.
You are probably familiar with the idea that every thing in the electromagnetic Universe has 2 states as a particle and a field of forces, which is like saying that things can be clumped into a ball or extended into its smallest elements. So particles can gather all his field in a ball (a mass if the field is gravitational, a charge if it is electromagnetic), or extended as if they would iron the mass of the ball in a long sheet. This happens constantly in the Universe, where electromagnetic sheets, the fields, fluctuate between particle and wave state.
So the vacuum space we see is basically an electromagnetic field of energy that constantly fluctuates, aggregating its spatial energy into clumps of mass called particles, mainly photons and electrons…
Those fluctuations happen in the electromagnetic field around a black hole as they happen around you. But you do not evaporate because those quantum particles are produced outside not inside your body. While the sweat that could evaporate and take away mass from your body is created inside your body.
So it happens in the case of the black hole: the sweat of electromagnetic particles is produced not inside the black hole but outside in the electromagnetic field around the black hole, creating pairs of particle-antiparticles, which mainly feed further the black hole as the rain that falls around you moistens your skin…
This again is obvious, but with the use of a lot of messy equations and paradoxical arguments (which in logic are called merely absurd arguments), Mr. Hawking affirms that photons are not born from the outside electromagnetic field but from the inside gravitational field of the black hole, taking energy from it. Again this is an absurd. Pears are not born of apple trees but from pear trees as much as electrons and light are born from electromagnetic fields, while the black hole is a knot of gravitational force that feed mainly of the heaviest particles of matter, the quarks we saw at RHIC…
How then the particles created outside the black hole can come from inside the black hole? It is worth to quote again Mr. Hawking because here he outdoes himself:
‘Another way of looking at the process is to regard the member of the pair of particles that falls into the black hole – the antiparticle, say – as being really a particle that is traveling backward in time. Thus the antiparticle falling into the black hole can be regarded as a particle coming out of the black hole but traveling backward in time. ‘
Yes. Mr. Hawking now is breaking the absolute law in which all science and reasoning except fundamentalist religion is based, the law of causality between past and future, which only Saint Augustine denies as only God should have the power of changing the flows of time.
Now, antiparticles come with negative time coefficients in some equations, which are, as the negative imaginary numbers of quantum theory, a formalism that latter we will explain in terms of ‘evolutionary time’. Enough to say for now that any quantity changed side in an equation acquires a negative symbol, but that doesn’t mean they travel backwards in time: merely they have inverse symmetries to the particles of our bodies. Further on, since the electromagnetic field becomes a couple of particles, and any of them can randomly feed the black hole there is no reason to believe that it is the antiparticle, not the particle which falls into the black hole. Any of both particles might fall, and the fact that we see massive radiation of energy around black holes is indeed a prove that 50% of those antiparticles probably annihilate with the particles of our side of the Universe, creating the massive radiation and explosions of energy we observe in black holes.
Otherwise we might believe that there is travel in time towards the past, that black holes are time machines or even doors to another Universe… All those pseudo-physical theories indeed would be sponsored latter on by Mr. Hawking’s kind of physics and became news on the popular press, but as we saw he himself had to apologize recently affirming he no longer believes that black holes are the door to other Universes… In 1977 he was not so humble.
Hawking instead theorizes that if we were observing the universe from future to past the particles falling into the black hole would appear coming from it and hence it would seem as the black hole evaporates. Certainly. If humans would come from future to past the death would seem to resurrect. But that doesn’t mean that in the real Universe, we observe the living dead, coming from the future into the past, nor have been observed in any part of that Universe, black holes evaporating into particles from future to past. Thus it seems much more obvious to suggest that zombies do not resurrect and black holes do not evaporate from future to past but rather feed from past to future in the Hawking radiation, while the dead rest in their tombs.
Yet even if black holes evaporate energy from future to past (and hence zombies resurrect), the ratio of ‘sweat’ seems smaller than the ratio of feeding, as a man who drinks water to replenish the one it sweats or an entire community that reproduces more babies than zombies resurrect.
Those facts are so obvious that in the old, more strict age of serious Physics, before Hawking and others broke with the basic epistemological laws of scientific truth (simplicity or Occkam’s razor, and logic veracity or principles of non-contradiction and causality), it would have taken a few minutes to dismiss Mr. Hawking’s work. A far more profound Unification Theory of quantum relativity by Mr. Weyl, was dismissed by Einstein with a simple letter. And Weyl complied.
But in an age of showmanship, physical bizarre theories of 11 dimensions, baby universes born in black holes (according to Mr. Hawking), and other niceties, it often deserves more attention one of such fancy theories that the serious, real equations that describe what we experience. And when we study those serious theories on black holes, all of them affirm that the black hole will grow exponentially and swallow the Earth. The only reason CERN has to adduce that this wont happen is Mr. Hawking’s radiation coming from the ‘future into the past’ (and hence perhaps evaporating us tomorrow as a sweat that appears as manna in the Holy Desert of the mythic age of human thought?)
