Linx
May 22, 2009 2 Comments
- All particles might be mini black holes. Does this mean that all black holes are giant particles?
- Arnold Kling says the only two elements of the political system are Progressive Corporatism and The Resistance.
- Excellent, concise post at Tea with FT about the arbitrariness of capital requirements:
If a bank regulator decided that the minimum capital requirements for the banks depended on how much some few specially designated fashion experts fancied the colour of the tie that the borrower´s chief executive officer wore; and that capital requirements so determined could then vary between a high of 12% of the loan and a low of 0.56% would you call this a free market? Of course not, not even if instead of the colour of ties what was used were the ratings of some vaguely defined credit-default risks.
- Steve Sailer cracks me up: “Here are hardworking scientists carefully digging up stuff, but some Broadway musical expert implies that they are racist for finding it and publicizing it.”
- George Will: “The [Obama] administration’s central activity — the political allocation of wealth and opportunity — is not merely susceptible to corruption, it is corruption.” (HT Cafe Hayek)
- Did you know that if you pay off your credit card bills you’ve been “enjoying the equivalent of a free ride” compared to people who don’t? (HT Dr. Frank)
BONUS ZINGS
- Mencius Moldbug on academics:
Academia is a guild of talented and ambitious professionals who, by demonstrating their large and dextrous brains – not to mention their impeccable networking skills, and their infinite patience with the brown product of the cow – extract money, power, and/or status from USG [the U.S. Government].
- Bryan Caplan on the Human Development Index (HDI):
Scandinavia comes out on top according to the HDI because the HDI is basically a measure of how Scandinavian your country is.
I’m not that sharp on Physics, but here’s a question;
Could the idea that all particles are a type of mini black hole, perhaps, explain “Dark Matter”?
For one thing, the idea that “all particles” are black holes is clearly speculative, and probably just a “hip” scientist way of saying, hey, some of these particles could be mini black holes.
Hence,
“Coyne and Cheng ask what properties black holes might have on that scale and it turns out that they may be far more varied than anyone imagined. The quantisation of space on this level means that mini-black holes could turn up at all kinds of energy levels. They predict the existence of huge numbers of black hole particles at different energy level.”
To me, it sounds like they are saying that any given particle could be a turn into a black hole. Or that, some particles, based upon their makeup, could turn into black holes.
In that case, we may have found the origin of Dark Matter.
What do you think?
Am I full of it?
I don’t know because I haven’t studied this in detail. But just on logic, the idea that all particles are black holes may or may not explain dark matter. Dark matter is just missing matter: we know (or think) more mass is there there based on how the universe behaves, but have never seen/observed it. If this theory just says that hydrogen, carbon, protons, neutrons, quarks etc etc – all the particles we already know about – are black holes (or collections of black holes), that wouldn’t explain dark matter at all. It would just be learning more information about the particles we know about.
On the other hand, they also seem to predict that (in addition to the particles we know about) large #s of different types of black holes ‘could’ exist at the small scale. In physics when they realize this or that particle ‘could’ exist, it usually does and they find it later. If so, there would be lots of tiny black holes out there, they would have lots of mass but be hard to detect. That does indeed fit the profile of dark matter.