Comments on: Graffitti from 1843 Key to Mysteries Investigated in LHC

By: Shahn Majid

Shahn Majid — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 16:45:33 +0000

HI Writing on substance D. A very interesting comment (the picture has now been captioned to make it clear that its of Hamilton not Connes by the way, sorry about that). So, what is graffiti exactly? As I understand it, Hamilton was being ebullient and was writing down symbols that expressed a personal `insight’ with but which others in his day did not take too seriously. Not too far
from graffiti I think. Certainly it was an act of artistic expression (with beauty in the eyes of some at any rate). What I find fascinating is that equations or algebra is also a kind of language with letters x,y,z,i,j,k etc and a few unusual symbols such as = and that the algebra of such symbols with rules of substitution defined by the = is actually a geometricial description of hard matter; electrons, muons, etc. I cant put my finger on it but there is something interesting about this in relation to `what is concrete reality’ v `what are mere words’.

By: Shahn Majid

Shahn Majid — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 16:34:47 +0000

Hi JL Wallace,

I guess your comment relates to last weeks post. There have been speculations like that in the past. Black holes are very interesting animals of course. I’m not so sure about the physics of baby universes springing up, but crossing the event horizon of a very large black hole you would not necessarily experience any extreme physics –locally physics would look much the same — so you could certainly have a black hole just inside a black hole, and another inside that etc if you like infinite regressions.

Also, there is a certain sense in which your decreasing distance to the centre now as your fall into the black hole now plays the role of an inexorably decreasing time coordinate and the vertical (in the time direction) singularity in the centre of a black hole can instead be viewed as a horizontal limit in your future. This is very far from what penrose is talking about, of course, but has some resonances; from the point of view of someone outside the black hole, you never actually fall in, it takes an infinite amount of time to do so; this business of conformal rescalings to scale back the infinite future to a finite boundary etc is exactly what penrose first applied to black holes `penrose diagrams’ so that all of this can be visualised better, to bring out the boundaries so to speak.

By: Graffiti from 1843 « Writing on Substance D

Graffiti from 1843 « Writing on Substance D — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 23:51:30 +0000

[...] to an article posted to the Cambridge University Press, “CambrdigeBlog”, yes. The above equation was carved into a bridge in Dublin by Alain [...]

By: JL Wallace

JL Wallace — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 20:48:02 +0000

I still like the theory brought up by Hawking: Blackholes and Baby Universes. It has a nice mobius-strip quality to it.

Blackholes in our universe, create Universes within their own space-time, that produce blackholes that create other universes that create blackholes, ad infinitum.

That way, you don’t get the funky “multiverse” theory – but rather a coherent “visual” understanding of the multi-verse.

The mathematics that explain a blackhole can be shared with the mathematics of the “beginning” of our “Big Bang” universe… it’s just another universe spawned from a blackhole of another Universe.