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[Highwayman]

Thick-Skinned Gravastars Vie to Replace Black Holes, in Theory
By Robert Roy Britt
Senior Science Writer
posted: 09:52 am ET
23 April 2002

As if black holes weren't mind-bending enough, a new hypothesis suggests an entirely new idea for Nature's densest objects. In fact, the idea goes black holes aren't holes at all but black bubbles with very thick skins.

The new idea, presented this week at a meeting of the American Physical Society, was conceived to provide an alternative to the exotic description of where stuff goes when a star collapses and becomes, in present theory, a black hole.

For most of us, the matter of where the matter goes is no less mysterious under the new notion.

Emil Mottola of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and Pawel Mazur of the University of South Carolina suggest that instead of a star collapsing into a pinpoint of space with virtually infinite gravity, its matter is transformed into a spherical void surrounded by "an extremely durable form of matter never before experienced on Earth."

The researchers call the objects gravastars. And, as with a black hole, you wouldn't want to get to close.

"Since this new form of matter is very durable, but somewhat flexible, like a bubble, anything that became trapped by its intense gravity and smashed into it would be obliterated and then assimilated into the shell of the gravastar," Mottola said.

There is no proof that this new form of matter exists, and thus gravastars remain for the moment no more than a potentially convenient proposal. But other astronomers are intrigued, both because black holes themselves remain mere theory, not fact, and because gravastars might explain strange physical observations that black holes don't.

Losing their grip

Black holes were conceived during World War 1 by the German astronomer Karl Schwarzschild, who while serving in the war was scratching solutions to Einstein's theories.

Black holes are theorized to be so dense that nothing, not even light, escapes the gravitational grip. Einstein first thought the idea was nuts. In a way, though, the concept is not as odd as one might think. Astronomers have clearly seen how any large object, such as the Sun or another star bends light and sends it on a new course. Black holes just bend light a whole lot more, folding its photons right into the object, Schwarzschild proposed.

Such excruciating bends cause the warping of both space and time, or space-time, as the theorists put it. Gravastars would be no less forgiving of what we traditionally call reality.

Inside a gravastar, space-time would be "totally warped," the researchers say. Further, the inner space would exert an outward force, which would enhance the durability of the bubble.

Mottola and Mazur have not worked out all the details of how gravastars might form. Yet they say the objects solve a flaw in black hole theory.

Physicists have long struggled to account for the tremendous entropy, or information, that a black hole would harbor. Theory holds that a black hole should have a billion, billion times more entropy sometimes referred to as states, than the star it formed from.

"Where are all these zillions of states hiding in a black hole?" Mottola said in a recent article in New Scientist magazine. "It is quite literally incomprehensible."

Gravastars don't have the same problem, as their entropy is said to be very low.

Remarkable properties

From the outside, a gravastar would appear much like a black hole; visible only by the high-energy emissions it spits from its jowls while consuming matter. Astronomers use X-ray observations, created by such cosmically carnivorous activity, to detect black holes. By noting the small region of space that can't be seen within a sphere inside those emissions, and by looking at the gravitational effects that the space has on surrounding matter, the black hole is deduced.

But inside, the material in a gravastar would have undergone a phase change, something like when water freezes to the solid state. The newly conceived, wildly dense phase of matter is theoretically rooted in a recent discovery.

In 1995, researchers cooled matter to near absolute zero and created a new form of matter called a Bose-Einstein condensate, in which the motion of electrons, protons, and everything else comes to a complete halt. Everything reaches a single state, called a quantum state, creating what's been called a "super atom."

The matter inside a gravastar would be akin to the Bose-Einstein condensate. It would exist in a vacuum, surrounded by an ultra-thin, ultra-cold, ultra-dark bubble, hence the name gra (vitational) va (cuum) star, or gravastar.

The "unique and remarkable properties" of a gravastar "could explain several high-energy astrophysical phenomena that now are puzzling," says Marek Abramowicz, a black hole expert at Gothenburg University.

Abramowicz thinks the violent creation of a gravastar might explain gamma ray bursts, distant explosions of incredible energy that puzzle researchers.

But Neil Cornish, an astrophysicist at the University of Montana, wonders whether an exploding star could shed enough entropy to become a gravastar. "I don't think that is a likely scenario," he told New Scientist.

Other theorists have criticized the gravastar hypothesis. Mottola and Mazur defend it but admit they have work to do before they can explain how the objects actually develop when a star collapses.

Yet even before they've figured this out, Mottola and Mazur have taken their extreme idea to a mentally dizzying new level: The say our entire universe may be the interior of a giant gravastar.

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/astronomy/gravastars_020423.html

[Highwayman]

Black Hole Appears, Disappears, and May Return Again
By Robert Roy Britt
Senior Science Writer
posted: 07:00 am ET
20 January 2003

 

When working with big numbers and data from faraway places, small errors can have huge consequences. Black holes, for example, can seem to pop in and out of existence, only to possibly materialize yet again.

Just ask the Hubble Space Telescope astronomers who last September announced they'd found a mid-sized black hole in a distant star cluster. Their apparent discovery provided long-sought and compelling evidence that the most massive black holes might evolve through mergers of smaller ones.

The Hubble team based their findings on observed motions of stars in the cluster, movement that can only be explained by a lot of mass that must exist in the center of the cluster. But just how tightly packed is that mass? They used a computer model that had been developed earlier by theorists at Indiana University to answer that question.

Unfortunately, a scientific paper explaining the Indiana model had one figure labeled incorrectly.

The error threw the Hubble calculations off, leading to the announcement of a black hole thought to weigh 4,000 times more than our Sun.

It turns out there may not even be a black hole in the star cluster, called M15, a separate team of astronomers now says. Instead, a more plausible explanation is that the central region of M15 is a mass cosmic grave littered with stellar corpses. These individual neutron stars and white dwarfs are dense objects, the remains of exploded stars.

Encore?

Astronomers have gone back-and-forth on the question of a black hole in M15 for some 30 years. In fact, in the early 1990s some Hubble data was used to refute the possibility. And this latest round of the saga is far from over.

The apparently evaporated black hole may soon theoretically reappear, SPACE.com has learned.

Astronomers will meet in California next week to argue the issue while discussing other topics.

Meanwhile the turnabout, if it is one, comes in part from fresh computer simulations done by a Japanese-led team from the University of Tokyo and published in the Astrophysical Journal earlier this month.

"The [original Hubble] findings do not require a black hole," said Steve McMillan, a Drexel University researcher and part of the Japanese-led team. "There are other ways of explaining the data." McMillan was careful to point out that the new calculations do not rule out a black hole.

Researchers involved in the September M15 finding and the computer-model developers from Indiana University have independently reached a similar conclusion and published their revised findings in the same journal.

What happened

The error fed into the Hubble study involved an underestimate of the number of neutron stars thought to exist near the center of M15, which sits about 32,000 light-years away, within our Milky Way Galaxy. Put more neutron stars into the picture and the mass of the black hole is mathematically driven down and can even be disregarded.

"The horizontal axis had been labeled incorrectly," said Roeland Van Der Marel of the Space Telescope Science Institute, which operates Hubble for NASA. "Little more than a typo, but with important consequences for our analysis. The Indiana group only discovered their error after we published our work."

Van Der Marel said the mistake was "a pity for all parties involved. But in the end, as scientists we are all just interested in learning about the true nature of the universe, so we are happy that the error was caught."

The snafu is important because middleweight black holes are viewed as a possible missing link in the evolution of the universe's first stellar black holes to supermassive black holes, which weighed as much as billions of stars. Because globular clusters are typically ancient star groupings, finding middleweight black holes in them would suggest they might have long ago served as building blocks; black hole mergers might have been very important to black hole growth.

Experts are hotly debating whether middleweights exist, however.

Holding out

The Hubble team reworked their calculations of M15, too. They came up with a new, lower ceiling for the possible mass of a black hole there, but they admit that there might not be one. Here's why: Because M15 is so densely packed with stars and other matter, it could drive neutron stars or white dwarfs toward the center, which would then mimic the appearance of a black hole harboring the collective mass of all the neutron stars.

"A black hole of 2,000 solar masses continues to be a possible interpretation of the data, although not necessarily the preferred one," Van Der Marel said Friday.

Karl Gebhardt, another member of the Hubble team, is a complete holdout.

The University of Texas astronomer worked on the original M15 finding and staunchly adheres to the likelihood of the middleweight black hole's presence. He does not think the original Indiana University model, even when applied with the correct numbers, paints a proper picture of the population of neutron stars.

"I still stand by the value of the mass that we reported," Gebhardt said in a telephone interview Friday.

The whole debate will be hashed out face-to-face beginning Jan. 27, when Gebhardt and his colleagues meet McMillan and other members of his Japanese-led team. Gebhardt expects a friendly and professional airing of quite different views at the Santa Barbara gathering.

"It's going to be me against the Japanese group," he said. "It's going to be a fun meeting."

Wildcards to play

Gebhardt is holding some wildcards.

In a separate Hubble-based study, also released last September and led by Gebhardt, similar evidence for a middleweight black hole was found in a globular cluster called G1. That discovery has not been double-checked (though the Japanese team is doing so right now and may report their result in Santa Barbara, McMillan said).

Gebhardt thinks the G1 finding is safe. "The same arguments do not apply in G1," he said.

The G1 cluster is not as concentrated as M15, he explained, so it is theoretically difficult to drive as many neutron stars to the center of G1. This implies that the more likely candidate for the mass there, to sufficiently describe the observed star motions, is a middleweight black hole.

Whatever comes of next week's meeting, Gebhardt says he's not worried about the fact that "most of the scientific community does not believe that globular clusters have black holes. I have a pile of other data on other globular clusters" that may well reveal additional middleweight black holes in about two months time.

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/blackhole_trick_030120.html

[Highwayman]

Milky Way's Big Black Hole Gets Downsized
By Ker Than
Staff Writer
posted: 02 November 2005
01:01 pm ET

The black hole that lies at the heart of our galaxy is much smaller than previously known. It could fit within the space between the Earth and the Sun, according to a new study.

Black holes are massive objects so dense that not even light can escape their gravitational pull.

Diameter estimates for one at the center of the Milky Way have ranged widely, from as small as the orbit of Mercury to as big as that of Pluto.

Last year, researchers estimated it was as wide as Earth's orbit around the Sun. The new estimate reduces that measurement by half, indicating the diameter of Sgr A*, as the object is known, is about 93 million miles -- same as the distance between Earth and the Sun.

The measurement was made using the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), a network of 10 radio telescopes spread out across the United States.

The finding is detailed in the Nov. 3 issue of the journal Nature.

Black hole or something else?

Sgr A* is located at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, about 26,000 light-years away. It is estimated to have a mass equal to about 4 million Suns. Such a high concentration of matter in such a small space places tight constraints on what the object could be if not a black hole.

An alternative possibility, though one not likely in the view of most theorists, is that the object might be a cluster of millions of collapsed dead stars, called neutron stars. If that were the case, the stars would only survive for about 20,000 years. At the end of that time, they would either collapse into black holes themselves or evaporate away into space.

The more likely alternative that Sgr A* is a supermassive black hole like those found at the centers of some other galaxies. Some of those black holes are more conspicuous, declaring their presence with highly visible streams of superheated matter, called particle jets.

While particle jets have been detected near Sgr A*, they have tended to be fainter and much shorter than those found around other supermassive black holes.

The new diameter measurements bring astronomers one step closer to detecting the theorized spherical region around a black hole that marks the boundary beyond which nothing-not even light-can escape the pull of gravity. This sphere is called the "event horizon," and detecting it would be the ultimate proof that Sgr A* is indeed a supermassive black hole.

Finding the event horizon

Event horizons have never been observed directly, but astronomers think they could be if a telescope's resolution was high enough. A sufficiently high-resolution image should reveal a dark circle-a "shadow"-caused by radiation from behind the black hole being sucked into the event horizon. Surrounding this shadow should be a bright ring of light caused by the deflection of light rays that just manage to scrape by the event horizon.

"Seeing that shadow would be the final proof that a supermassive black hole is at the center of our Galaxy," said Fred Lo, Director of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory and a researcher in the new study.

Such a shadow would be extremely faint and small from Earth, but could be detected if telescope resolutions could be improved to 1.5 times their current state, scientists say.
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/051102_black_hole.html

[k+]

fascinating stuff -- many thanks.

makes my day to read some of these things.


the article on the errors is nice to see; it points to one of the reasons I stopped following much of this stuff long ago -- the number of rather unprofessional mistakes is rather high. what's worse there's a tendency to publish too soon due to career pressures and so forth.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomagnetic_reversal

above article claims the Sun's magnetic field reverses polarity on the order of 7--15 years, amongst other things.

they claim no evidence for extinction events associated with earth's magnetic reversals -- particularly the periods before the reversal when the field strength goes to near zero for awhile would be of concern, because aside from the molecules in the atmosphere, it is the geomagnetic field which seems to protect the earth from dangerous ionizing radiation.

now that the world leaders can project themselves in computer-generated professionally scripted avatar-like 3d videos on HD screens sold for profit worldwide, we or our ancestors should be well entertained while they all go to lead protected underground bunkers while we (or our ancestors) toast during zero mag time.

 

[k+]

btw, here's a link found next to an article you posted -- it's on gamma ray bursts:

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/planetearth/magnetic_gamma_010713.html

this must be one of the things that got the 2012-ers their beam ideas, but maybe not.

In any case it's another thing to worry about if one wants to -- maybe such a formation will occur somewhere near enough to effects things here.

One interesting numerical coincidence just popped out --- the precession of the equinoxes, one cycle takes approx. 26,000 years; also the distance from the Sun (and earth) to the center of the Milky Way (where the gigantic black hole is rumoured to maybe reside) is quoted at either 26,000 light years, and sometimes 28,000 light years.

One is linear, the other quite different having to do with the effect of the moon an sun on the earth's axis of rotation. But if accurate would imply that maybe light signals could get from the center of the galaxy to the earth once every precession.

No idea what to make of such a thing, but it's an interesting coincidence. Not sure if with various galactic drifts and others that it makes any kind of physical sense anyway. It is not in any way -- the precession -- like some sort of circular orbit, though of course various orbits occur during the precession cycle. Strange coincidence, maybe.

For instance, the Sun's galactic rotational time period around the Milky Way is ~ 220 Million years.

[Highwayman]

K, have you read anything about white holes theory? The question is if matter is being injected/ejected at the core of active galaxies, who knows what the physics behind that is? What's to stop our galaxy core from 'erupting'?

I am browsing through this book: White Holes by John Bribbin. It's a little outdated, and I suppose some of the theories and stuff have been blown out of the water by now, and others might have evolved, but it's great reading - nice style of writing!
From Wiki He published his 100th book, The Fellowship, in 2005.

His book, Get a Grip on Physics (2003), saw a sudden surge in sales at Amazon.com after it was spotted in the pictures of Tiger Woods' crashed car on November 27, 2009.

Quote:
The only way we will know if our Galaxy turns into a quasar will be
when the blast of light, the electromagnetic radiation, and the high-
energy particles reach us. Since we orbit the Galaxy at a distance of
about ten kiloparsecs from the nucleus, for all we know the nucleus
could have exploded any time in the past 30,000 years without our yet
knowing about it. The light from the explosion, closely followed by a
sleet of energetic cosmic ray particles, which would take that long to
reach us, may even now be on its way- unqoute

Some more stuff from the ebook:

It is a remarkable coincidence, if indeed it is a coincidence, that the
most dense and massive objects visible in our Universe are without
exception expanding rapidly and pouring out great quantities of
energy. Standard ideas, whether those of Newtonian or Einsteinian phys-
ics, suggest rather that these concentrations of matter should be
collapsing under the influence of their own gravitational fields; the
implication, as Fred Hoyle pointed out during the sixties, is that
conventional theories must break down when they are applied to such
objects as galactic nuclei and quasars, which, as we now see, may be
the same thing viewed at different times. For many years, Hoyle’s
advocacy of this extreme course of action was far from welcomed by
other astronomers, let alone those physicists who work in the more com-
fortable familiarity of laboratory experiments. With the breakthrough of
less conventional ideas having become acceptable in the wake of the
remarkable observations of strange sources by satellites monitoring X-
rays and gamma rays, and with speculation about black holes now
respectable, the idea that a new physics—or a new development of the
old physics—may be needed to explain the most energetic events in the
Universe is no longer frowned upon. To get attention for such ideas, it
helps if one is a Fred Hoyle of science, but lesser mortals can get a

hearing for unconventional views, even if those views are not always
taken seriously. Some of the ideas that have been touted seem
ridiculous, but we must be prepared to consider them. We do not know
why a white hole should gush. We can make great progress in explaining
energetic phenomena in terms of cosmic gushers, or white holes, but
only by assuming that something has started the gusher off. It is much
like accepting that the Universe exists and that it originated in a Big
Bang, without knowing why or how the Big Bang was set off. Whether
we are examining the origin of the Universe or the cause of the
explosions in Seyfert galaxies, this is unsatisfactory, but progress is being
made. As we shall see in Part III, there are plausible theories about the
nature of the Big Bang and the origin of the Universe, theories which tell
much about the likely future of the Universe. On the smaller scale of
white-hole explosions in galaxies and quasars, there are some clear
signposts for theorists.[ ]


[ ]Though this line of reasoning scarcely seems worth following up, it
seems to have fascinated some mathematicians. As recently as
December 1975 another pair of relativists, Joe and Nathan Rosen,
published a similar theory claiming to do away with black holes. Any
theory which purports to remove the possibility of black-hole
singularities at a stroke and also offers an explanation of quasars and
Seyferts is worthy of noting, even if it seems dubious. The Rosen-Rosen
theory depends upon two components in the mathematical formulation
of the field equations, with one component describing everyday
gravitational effects and the other bringing in inertial forces.
When the two-component theory is applied to the problem of the
stability of a cold neutron star—which, you may remember, is the key to
black-hole formation in other theories—the exact results depend on how
much of the second component you mix into the model. Whereas
relativity predicts that a cold star of more than three solar masses must
collapse first into a black hole and then into a singularity, the Rosen-
Rosen theory allows stability for masses in a range six to twelve times
that of the Sun. If one accepts the model, it explains the existence of a
compact neutron star, rather than a black hole, in tile famous source
Cygnus X-1. But it does not explain the very rapid flickering of that
source, the best real evidence for the presence of a black hole. Aside
from that, Rosen-Rosen neutron stars will collapse if they become more
massive. The question is, just what form does such a collapse take? The
Rosens say that their theory “does not admit black holes,” but even
Newtonian theory admits black holes, and holds that any dense object
will be invisible if its surface gravity is so great that light cannot escape.
What the Rosen-Rosen equations indicate is that, in their model,
collapsing stars more massive than twelve solar masses do not
disappear into a singularity but turn inside out, as it were, collapsing
right through themselves and becoming expanding objects. It’s an
interesting speculation, especially considering the possibility of such
collapsing-expanding objects being temporary but non-singular black
holes.
During the critical moments when the star turns inside out it will be
inside a quite ordinary Newtonian event horizon, as far as particles are
concerned, so that the trick, like most magic tricks, will take place out of
sight of the audience. First a collapsar, then an expandar. What will this
sort of gusher look like? While everything is jammed into a tiny volume,
conditions must be very much like the fireball in which the Universe
began. As re-expansion begins, nothing can escape until the critical
density is reached. Matter and radiation must be intermingled, as in the
early moments of the life of the Universe. As soon as the density
decreases sufficiently for the escape velocity to drop below that of light,
radiation and energetic particles blast away at or just under the speed of
light, with most of the mass following at less dramatic speeds. A good
massive object, such as one of 100,000 million solar masses, as the
initial collapsar might make the end product look very much like a
Seyfert galaxy or a quasar. How all that mass would be involved in a
collapse is essentially the same problem as that of the origin of galaxies
in the expanding Universe. There is no plausible way of accounting for
the collapse of objects that massive from a roughly uniform cloud of
expanding material, and once a retarded core or something similar is
added to hold things together, the inside-out theory of cosmic explosions
is no longer needed. The mathematicians get an “A” for their ingenuity of
equation juggling but a raspberry for forgetting the physical realities of
the real Universe.
The White Hole and Universal Gushers
The analogy between the white-hole gusher and the universal gusher
can, however, productively be pushed a long way as it is possible to
describe what an exploding gusher or a white hole should look like under
different circumstances. Narlikar has remained active in the study of this
kind of object, in recent years producing a series of fascinating papers
with colleagues at the Tata Institute in Bombay. In one particularly
significant paper, published in 1975. Narlikar and Professor K. M. V.
Apparao took a mathematical look at the possible relationships between
different sizes of white holes and the whole range of puzzling
phenomena now plaguing high-energy astrophysicists. As the basis of
their work they accept that an exploding white hole might exist, just as
in cosmology we accept that the expanding Universe exists, and they
look at the kind of electromagnetic spectrum that should be produced by
a white hole, taking into account the inevitable blue shift of the
radiation. The early stages follow the same equations as those of the
Einstein—de Sitter cosmology which we have already used in calculating
the behavior of a retarded core on the scale of a galaxy. Unlike some
mathematicians, Narlikar and Apparao are adept at explaining the
implications of their equations in terms of the physics of the processes
involved.
White-hole explosions are both violent and short-lived, and Narlikar
and Apparao state that it is natural to see if they can explain some of the
explosive and transient phenomena observed in astronomy. Although the
effects of white-hole behavior on the electromagnetic radiation produced
can be calculated, exactly what kind of radiation is being produced
inside the white hole cannot. There is doubt about how the theoretical
spectrum of electromagnetic radiation can be made to fit the observed
spectrum of radiation from explosive and transient astronomical sources,
but, given the assumptions involved, it wouldn’t be appropriate to push
the theory too far in its present form.[ ]

I will see if I can post the whole e-book for you to read - at the music site! Don't worry Manu!.

See this:
[ ]If the possibility that potential white holes might turn into black holes
remains a question in the minds of some relativists, this is more than
compensated for by the amazing discovery in the mid-seventies that
black holes can explode. Indeed, any black hole must eventually
explode, according to our present understanding of the equations—the
question is, when? This dramatic discovery emerged from a study of the
nature of black holes by the young mathematician Stephen Hawking—
surely the most able relativist of his generation, with a fine grasp of
physical reality—and his colleagues. They attempted to develop an
understanding of black holes in terms of four basic laws, equivalent to or
transcending the four laws of thermodynamics. The direction of this
work is important to current and future research and may lead to an
eventual combination of the ideas of relativity, statistical mechanics, and
quantum mechanics that could be the development of a new physics to
explain high-energy events involving large masses and high densities. A
single insight from Hawking, that black holes explode (or, as he has put
it, “black holes aren’t black”), is sufficient to emphasize the way our
picture of fundamental universal processes has changed within the
recent past.
At its simplest, the discovery that black holes can interact with the
outside Universe and radiate away energy until they are no longer
massive enough to remain stable black holes depends on the basic inter-
changeability of mass and energy. Any sufficiently strong energy field
can, in principle, lead to the spontaneous creation of particles as the
energy present in a small volume is converted to matter occupying the
same volume. This process always involves the production of pairs of
particles, a particle, such as an electron, and its equivalent antiparticle,
such as a positron. In this way, the various laws of conservation of
electric charge, momentum, and so on are maintained, even though
matter and energy interchange. The paired particles can collide quickly
with one another and be mutually annihilated, their mass being
converted back into energy as electromagnetic radiation. One of the
curious features of quantum theory is that pairs of particles can be
produced in this way even when the background energy density is low,
provided that they annihilate one another within a very short time. This
depends on the uncertainty principle named after Heisenberg, which, in
everyday terms, states that we cannot be certain that there is insufficient
energy available for a particle pair to exist for a tiny fraction of a second;
therefore, they can exist for that brief interval, and the vacuum of space
could be full of particle pairs flicking in and out of existence. Such a
situation—known as vacuum fluctuations—has little practical relevance,
but it may be relevant to the question of the existence of the whole
Universe, as we shall see in Chapter 8.[ ]

Etc etc etc

[kww]

Fears? I'm just hoping to not pay property tax and health insurance for much longer.    Thanks for all your ideas and thoughts people.

[k+]

Yes, I did hear about 'white holes' in cosmological contexts years ago.

If I'd be allowed to maunder somewhat in a way to illustrate what might be the essence of these things, along with the way that science can be so arrogant as to intimidate people to where they don't think for themselves, I should suggest as follows.

"You say sir, follower of Hubble, Einstein and the many modern cosmologists, as well as the many ancients who advocated creation ex nihilo, that all the worldly universal substance was once in a nothingless point, and popped with great force into existence. Is that your idea?"

"Well, I suppose so, if you out it that way."

"Well then I would say Sir, if there was or is a power that or who did such a thing at one time, and if we simply think of such a property as being an attribute of ANY point in space, rather than some particular one, as your fantasized origin myth supposes; I say if we abstract and contemplate such an awesome power, then we must suppose that AT ANY TIME and AT ANY PLACE such a manifestation could appear! It only follows logically that it is possible!

Why should you dare to restrict a creation ex nihilo power to your paltry constraints based on the human sense of things -- coming into being, birth and death and so on?"

"Yes, I suppose you're right about that. From some place we call next to an atom of something 15 meters above a grain of sand in the Gobi desert one day could emerge another Universe, if that principle was applied."

[k+]

Also, kww's thoughts are rather pertinent these days and all days. Perhaps this thread should be continued in 2 places higher up in the bb structure: one for cosmology and the other for discussion of the very great inequities and or iniquities.

Meanwhile, some very nasty scammer is ruining our enjoyment of this board.

If I can be of any assistance, Manu, please let me know.

I doubt I can, actually. Technically, these days things are getting rather troublesome. Not so much because things are insecure, as media reports would lead us to believe, but because there are so many more nitwits about plying amateur hacking techniques to simple scripts whose authors never anticipated these sorts of idiotic attacks -- not per cleverness, but per volume, and their intensification due to shoddy birth-control, and more generally lack of other forms of entertainment. Including the inculcation widely of the belief that seemingly clever, but actually low-grade subterfuge and/or interference is something to be proud of. Mainly because popular culture celebrates crime, espionage and such nonsense during peacetime. What a price to pay for teenagers watching silly movies and needing to show off to friends on internet social networks.


 

[Highwayman]

... not per cleverness, but per volume, and their intensification due to shoddy birth-control, and ...

ROFL! 

[Highwayman]

BTW these are chinese bots set to "advertise" an internet game site selling  - of all things - virtual "money" and "gold" so that you can buy your way up the levels in online games!

I stuffed around with them a bit - their website is not sophisticated at all! I was able to log in a few times with gibberish names and got myself a sales order number - so I started complaining about them taking my money and not sending stuff. Was happy to stuff around at least one online employee for a while...