BBCWed, 18 Jan 2006 12:00 UTC
A fireball created in a US particle accelerator has the characteristics of a black hole, a physicist has said.
It was generated at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) in New York, US, which smashes beams of gold nuclei together at near light speeds.
Horatiu Nastase says his calculations show that the core of the fireball has a striking similarity to a black hole.
His work has been published on the pre-print website arxiv.org and is reported in New Scientist magazine.
When the gold nuclei smash into each other they are broken down into particles called quarks and gluons.
These form a ball of plasma about 300 times hotter than the surface of the Sun. This fireball, which lasts just 10 million, billion, billionths of a second, can be detected because it absorbs jets of particles produced by the beam collisions.
But Nastase, of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, says there is something unusual about it.
Ten times as many jets were being absorbed by the fireball as were predicted by calculations.
The Brown researcher thinks the particles are disappearing into the fireball's core and reappearing as thermal radiation, just as matter is thought to fall into a black hole and come out as "Hawking" radiation.
However, even if the ball of plasma is a black hole, it is not thought to pose a threat. At these energies and distances, gravity is not the dominant force in a black hole.
The RHIC is sited at the Brookhaven National Laboratory.
Comment: Disinformation becomes a standard in the media. It is necessary to be able to spot disinformation so as not to be its victim. How can we do it? Is there a method? Sometimes it is difficult if one is not an expert in the given area. Sometimes it is difficult even for an expert, as there are many experts who are experts in their domain, but not in the domain of disinformation! Experts are often naive; they easily become tools in the hands of economic and political manipulators. But ad rem: here we have News from BBC news service. The news starts with, "A fireball created in a US particle accelerator has the characteristics of a black hole, a physicist has said." Our attention should be drawn to the phrase "a physicist has said." When we see such a statement, that usually means that the person has no scientific record, that is someone not known by previous achievements. Then comes the name "Horatiu Nastase says his calculations show...". So we learn the name of "a physicist" and we do our search. The search brings us to
Horatiu Nastase's Homepage and we see that we are dealing with a young postdoc.
Extra-Terrestrial Weekly Newsletter makes our poor Horatio "a Brown University Professor" while
Science 24 blatantly states that
he (Horatio) has created a black hole (!):
At the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider particle accelerator in Upton, New York, physicist Horatiu Nastase may have created a black hole. (BBC)
BBC was then crediting Horatiu Nastase as "His work has been published on the pre-print website arxiv.org and is reported in New Scientist magazine." Whenever we see "arxiv.org" we should be alerted. Bad things have happened to arxiv.org in the last ten years and its policies are being rightly criticised. See
Carlos Castro's "My Struggle with Ginsparg (arXiv.org) and the Road to Cyberia: A Scientific-Gulag in Cyberspace" and
Tony Smith's "arXiv Blacklisting and the World of Physics". (By the way, among the members of the "
Advisory Board" of arxive.org, the most popular first name is
David!) Good papers are being blacklisted, and nonsensical papers are accepted due to the support of anonymous "endorsers". New Scientist also became a tool of disinformation, often propagating nonsense for the sake of attracting the public and diverting attention from the real problems of science.
Checking newsgroups about the black hole we find, in March 2005: "Horatiu Nastase thinks so, but an informal census reveals his work is very controversial." After March 2005, nobody talks about Horatiu Nastase on newsgroups, and in his
December 2005 paper, he ends with :
Thus as we advocated in "The RHIC fireball as a dual black hole", we have shown that we can describe the gravity dual picture for high energy scattering completely in terms of field theory, but we have seen the limitations of field theory in terms of calculability. The thermal property of black holes in the gravity dual is easily understood as the thermal property of "horizons" in the effective pion field. The colliding pion field shockwaves are seen as being just boosted versions of nucleons. The nucleons are described as solutions of an effective action, and lead to good qualitative features for the description of nuclei.
Which means: there is nothing extra-ordinary, just another speculation.
Next time you see a sensational title from the BBC or New Scientist, ask yourself: "Do really I believe it? Or is someone playing games with me?"
Comment: Disinformation becomes a standard in the media. It is necessary to be able to spot disinformation so as not to be its victim. How can we do it? Is there a method? Sometimes it is difficult if one is not an expert in the given area. Sometimes it is difficult even for an expert, as there are many experts who are experts in their domain, but not in the domain of disinformation! Experts are often naive; they easily become tools in the hands of economic and political manipulators. But ad rem: here we have News from BBC news service. The news starts with, "A fireball created in a US particle accelerator has the characteristics of a black hole, a physicist has said." Our attention should be drawn to the phrase "a physicist has said." When we see such a statement, that usually means that the person has no scientific record, that is someone not known by previous achievements. Then comes the name "Horatiu Nastase says his calculations show...". So we learn the name of "a physicist" and we do our search. The search brings us to Horatiu Nastase's Homepage and we see that we are dealing with a young postdoc.
Extra-Terrestrial Weekly Newsletter makes our poor Horatio "a Brown University Professor" while Science 24 blatantly states that he (Horatio) has created a black hole (!): BBC was then crediting Horatiu Nastase as "His work has been published on the pre-print website arxiv.org and is reported in New Scientist magazine." Whenever we see "arxiv.org" we should be alerted. Bad things have happened to arxiv.org in the last ten years and its policies are being rightly criticised. See Carlos Castro's "My Struggle with Ginsparg (arXiv.org) and the Road to Cyberia: A Scientific-Gulag in Cyberspace" and Tony Smith's "arXiv Blacklisting and the World of Physics". (By the way, among the members of the "Advisory Board" of arxive.org, the most popular first name is David!) Good papers are being blacklisted, and nonsensical papers are accepted due to the support of anonymous "endorsers". New Scientist also became a tool of disinformation, often propagating nonsense for the sake of attracting the public and diverting attention from the real problems of science.
Checking newsgroups about the black hole we find, in March 2005: "Horatiu Nastase thinks so, but an informal census reveals his work is very controversial." After March 2005, nobody talks about Horatiu Nastase on newsgroups, and in his December 2005 paper, he ends with : Which means: there is nothing extra-ordinary, just another speculation.
Next time you see a sensational title from the BBC or New Scientist, ask yourself: "Do really I believe it? Or is someone playing games with me?"