a month ago I told you about Steven wolfram's attempt to develop a Theory of Everything based on hypergraphs and just the other day I learned from new scientists that if he's right it would imply a characteristic change in the emission of super massive black holes that could be observable that would be very interesting if to so let's have a look in my recent video about wolfram's hypergraphs I mentioned that most of the recent work on this seems to have been done by a young mathematician by the name of Jonathan gorah I didn't know though that
the two seemed to not be on the best of terms as gar mentioned on X Twitter that spending the last 5 years watching Steven take so credit for ideas insights developments and discoveries that were the products of our collaboration has been a uniquely exhausting experience this new work also comes from Jonathan gorah and is based on hypergraphs but it doesn't seem to directly involve Steven Wolfram as a brief recap a hypergraph is a set of graphs or networks that describe space time not just space but space time they have a finite resolution that on the
one hand can reproduce Einstein's theories to good accuracy on the other hand it can avoid the troubles that Einstein's theories have on the shortest distance scales where singularities can form this way the hypergraphs might one day also helped to recombine general relativity with quantum physics discretizing SpaceTime has of course been tried before but most attempts have run into conflict with observations quickly this is because in Einstein's theory you just can't have discrete chunks of a fixed volume of space this is because of length contraction something that's very big for one Observer will be very small
for another one and volumes of space can change so the idea of having discrete space is itself incompatible with Einstein's theories hypergraphs circumvent this problem because that treating space and time together as one entity and have deviations at small volumes of space time not volumes of space but space time if length contracts and time dilates but the product Remains the Same so this doesn't result in any obvious problems with the symmetries of Einstein's theories Goran now used these hypergraphs to describe what happens if a black hole accretes matter the matter will spiral into the hole
and heat up dramatically along the way this releases a lot of radiation we can observe this radiation from many super massive black holes in the middles of big galaxies in a paper from February gorah uses fluid dynamics to describe the accretion of matter onto black holes and says that the amount of energy that is emitted depends on how dense the hypergraphs are you see this blue holy stuff here that's a hyper graph which replaces The Continuous SpaceTime the less dense the graph the higher the deviations from Einstein's theory in the paper he doesn't quantify it
but just somewhat vaguely writes that these results provide tentative evidence that there may exist astrophysically observable effects of the underlying discreetness of SpaceTime arising within certain quantum gravity models then a few weeks ago he leaked on X Twitter some preliminary results According to which preliminary simulations suggest that this could result in a boost in jet Luminosity assuming approximately plank scale discreetness of around two to three times over the predictions of classical general relativity big of two as I say because that might mean that we could be closer to finding evidence for the quantization of gravity
than we thought however the reaction of physicists today claim was deep skepticism alesandro strumia writes the physics is low energy junk falling in a hole effects of plank scale physics should be tiny and had Jacobson quoted a new scientist says likewise I don't see how this idea can make sense any viable discreetness would be at a very small scale compared to the scale relevant for the physics of accretion the reason they're saying this is that usually you expect deviations from Einstein's theories at a strong SpaceTime curvature or at extremely high energy densities respectively I I
know it's somewhat counterintuitive but the SpaceTime curvature near black holes is actually very small and the energies that are involved there are also small at least compared to the ones where you expect deviations due to quantum gravity somewhere at the plank scale that said I think this criticism ignores the exact way that hypergraphs implement the space-time discreteness asor writes the deviations come from the way that hypergraphs suddenly increase the ratio of the number of possible paths that cross into the black hole Horizon because there just aren't any other paths it adds to this that fluid
dynamics is fundamentally chaotic it can amplify effects from short to large distances this is the famous butterfly effect so I think the case isn't all that clearcut and it's worth to wait and see what gorah is up to did you know that I have a free Weekly Newsletter with some extra news items you can sign up at zabin hossenfelder docomo so what are we to make out of this prediction that super massive black holes might test quantum gravity honestly I strongly doubt that what gorah says is correct I actually find this interesting for reasons that
have nothing to do with quantum gravity is that gor is clearly a mathematician by heart so are Steven wolf at Eric Weinstein and Peter white but physics isn't math mathematicians usually know nothing about theory development and seeing them do physics is like watching a rabbit hop into a snake pit you know it's not going to end well but you just can't look away so don't forget to subscribe to me science is more than a profession it's a way to understand the world and to solve problems this is why I'm happy to work together with brilliant
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