527 - A Brief History of Time, United States, 1991. Dir. Errol Morris.

Thursday, November 29, 2018

527 - A Brief History of Time, United States, 1991.  Dir. Errol Morris.

Roger Penrose was having a conversation with his friend Ivor Robinson while walking.  When the two of them got to a road and had to cross it, they stopped talking while crossing the road.  When they arrived at the other side, they began talking again.

While Penrose was crossing the road and not talking, he had a thought.  It gave him great joy.

But when he arrived at the other side and began talking again, he no longer remembered his thought.  Yet his joy remained.  And swelled to elation.

So later in the evening he asked himself why he was feeling such rapture.  He knew he was happy but did not know why.  In order to find out, he reverse engineered his day, working his way back through the events of the day until he arrived at the moment he was crossing the road.

It was that moment that had given him joy.

Then he remembered his thought.

He announced it.

When stars collapse indefinitely, they will become singular.

In other words, if a star is a great mass of energy that will one day die out, when it does die out its tremendous gravitational force will cause it to implode.  As it implodes, its gravitational force will increase even more, pulling everything into the center until the entire mass becomes a single point.  A singularity.

Euclid - A point is that which has no part.

Penrose - A star collapses into a point.  Therefore, it has no part.  It is a singularity.  A point of infinite density and zero size.

Penrose published his paper.

Gravitational Collapse and Spacetime Singularities

The physics community embraced it.

People around the world began studying an object called "a gravitationally completely collapsed object."

They wrote papers and gave speeches on "a gravitationally completely collapsed object."

John Wheeler of Princeton got tired of saying that phrase.  Imagine giving a speech and having to say it ten times in the span of a few minutes.  A gravitationally completely collapsed object.  A gravitationally completely collapsed object.  A gravitationally completely collapsed object.

Unwieldy.

So he coined a new term.

Black Hole.

That took.

Not only did scientists around the world begin using the term, but it also captured the imagination of the public at large.

In 1979 Walt Disney released a feature film called The Black Hole.  It starred Maximilian Schell, who had won the Oscar for playing Hans Rolfe in Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) (and had been nominated for The Man in the Glass Booth (1975) and Julia (1977)), and Anthony Perkins, who had delivered one of the greatest film performances in history with Psycho (1960) (and had been nominated four years before for Friendly Persuasion (1956) but not for Psycho).

Maximilian Schell's character Dr. Hans Reinhardt is the mad scientist who wants to fly his spacecraft through a Black Hole and come out the other side.

"In, through, and beyond."

Ernest Borgnine as Harry Booth says that's crazy.  Impossible.

Our scientists tell us why it is a bad idea.

Stephen Hawking says you will end up like spaghetti.

Then he expounds.

As a massive star contracts, its gravity becomes so strong that light can no longer escape.  Nothing can escape.  The region from which nothing can escape is called a Black Hole.  Its boundary is called the Event Horizon.

If an astronaut were to jump into a Black Hole, his watch would slow down infinitely, each second taking longer, until the last second is never reached.  Time stops.

His image would also be preserved forever; however, it would grow so dim that no one could see it.

Brandon Carter explains that as seen from the outside, it would appear that time for the astronaut who has jumped into the Black Hole has slowed down.  The astronaut himself would experience things as being normal, but the outsider would see him as being frozen in a particular position.  Then he would never see what happens afterwards.

John Taylor explains that the person could fall into the Event Horizon and last a week without feeling anything different.  But eventually, as he approaches the Singularity, he will grow longer and thinner, longer and thinner.  He will get squeezed to the point that he is a long strand.  By two weeks he will be dead.

Brandon Carter claims that you would see everything happening, including the future, but at a rate so fast it would be like fireworks.  You could not analyze or understand what you are seeing.

John Wheeler compares a Black Hole to a boy at a ball wearing a black tuxedo in the dark.  He dances with a girl in a white dress.  While you cannot see the man, you can see the girl twirling around him, giving you evidence that he is there.  The stars that are still alive and shining spin around the collapsed stars, the Black Holes, giving us evidence that they are there.

Stephen Hawking says the area of the Event Horizon must always increase with time.  This increase in area once reminded him of Entropy, the measure of the disorder of a system.  Entropy also increases with time.

Jacob Bekenstein took that idea a step further and said the area of the Event Horizon was the actual Entropy of the Black Hole.  Hawking disagreed, because if a Black Hole had Entropy, then it had to have a temperature and therefore radiation.  But if nothing escapes a Black Hole, then it cannot have a radiation.

He would go on to discover that Black Holes do have radiation and that radiation does escape them.

Dennis Sciama calls it a Residual Radiation.

Shortly after Roger Penrose described the concept of the Black Hole, Stephen Hawking asked if it could be applied to the origins of the universe.

If a star collapsing on itself becomes a singularity, could we reverse time and imagine an ever expanding universe going back to the moment of creation, the Big Bang, and see if it too was a singularity.  A point of infinite density and zero size.

Hawking wanted to prove that the universe had a beginning.

He was working under the model of classical physics.  Einstein's General Theory of Relativity.  Which asserted that the universe was ever expanding.  If it was ever expanding, then it must have begun from a single point.

The problem Hawking found was that at that point (in space and in time) all scientific theories broke down.  Science could not apply to that point itself.

Later in his career, Hawking moved into Quantum Mechanics and applied the rules of uncertainty to his studies.

He then considered that the universe might not have a beginning.

He began to study the Imaginary Direction of Time.  Imaginary Time does not require singularities which form a beginning or end to time.

The classical theory presents time with a single beginning point and a single ending point.

The imaginary theory presents time with a rounded bowl beginning and a rounded bowl ending, or in a sense, no beginning and no ending.

Errol Morris continues his documentary style of interviewing subjects hands-off and letting them say what they wish to say.  He also cuts back and forth between them as if they were having a conversation.  Yet he has now grown sophisticated in his use of inserts of photographs, charts, graphics, video, and visual effects.

He balances his time between Hawking's personal life and disease, as shared by his family and friends, and his scientific work, as shared by and with his colleagues.  He also chooses not to focus on Hawking alone but also on the breakthroughs made by other scientists, such as Roger Penrose and John Wheeler, and the influence of mentor Dennis Sciama.

Here is a bit on Hawking's background.

Stephen Hawking considered two fields of study at Cambridge: 1) Cosmology - the study of the very large, and 2) Elementary Particles - the study of the very small.

He felt Elementary Particles were less attractive because there was no proper theory for them.  He felt that scholars simply arranged them into families as in botany.  But Cosmology had a well-defined theory in Einstein's General Theory of Relativity.

His mother, his sister, his aunt, his classmates, his friends, and his caretaker discuss the development of his disease, identified as ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis).

Hawking himself calls it Motor Neuron Disease in the film but not Lou Gehrig's disease.  Perhaps that is an American designation not used in Britain, as Lou Gehrig was an American baseball player.

The film presents Hawking as someone interested in many areas of life and not a focused student.  He himself admits that he wasted much of his time at university.  The disease may have helped him change that.

The disease did two things for him.  One, the idea that he had two and a half years to live gave him a great deal of focus.  He poured everything he had into his work.  Two, as with a blind person who develops a tremendous sense of hearing, known as Sensory Compensation, Hawking developed a tremendous ability to visualize pictures in his mind.

Hawking began to think in terms of pictures and diagrams that he could visualize.  This may have helped him to make discoveries that he never would have made otherwise.

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Stephen Hawking

The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time, Stephen Hawking and George Ellis

I realized that if I reversed the direction of time so that the collapse became an expansion, I could prove that the universe had a beginning.

As a massive star contracts, its gravity becomes so strong that light can no longer escape.  The region from which nothing can escape is called a black hole, and its boundary is called the event horizon.

One might say of the Event Horizon what Dante said of the entrance to Hell.  "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here."

The number of Black Holes may be greater than the number of visible stars, which totals about a hundred thousand million [one hundred billion] in our galaxy alone.

We also have evidence that there is a very large Black Hole at the center of our own galaxy.

If Black Holes have an Entropy, they ought to have a temperature.  And if they have a temperature, they ought to give off radiation.  But how could they give off radiation if nothing can escape a Black Hole.  As it turned out, Bekenstein was basically correct, though in a manner far more surprising than he or anyone else had expected.

A particle does not have just a single path through space and time.  Instead, there is an uncertainty principle according to which both the exact position and velocity of a particle can never be known.

I found that particles could escape from a Black Hole.  Black Holes are not completely black.

According to Quantum Mechanics, space is filled with Virtual Particles and Antiparticles that are constantly materializing in pairs--separating, coming together again, and annihilating each other.  In the presence of a Black Hole, one member of a pair of Virtual Particles may fall into the Hole, leaving the other member without a partner with which to annihilate.  The forsaken Particle appears to be Radiation emitted by the Black Hole.

And so Black Holes are not eternal.  They evaporate away at an increasing rate until they vanish in a gigantic explosion.

It seems that Einstein was doubly wrong.  The quantum effects of Black Holes suggest that not only does God play dice, [but also] he sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen.

Black Hole Radiation has shown us that Gravitational Collapse is not as final as we once thought.  If an astronaut falls into a Black Hole, he will be returned to the rest of the universe in the form of Radiation.  Thus, in a sense, the astronaut will be recycled.  However, it would be a poor sort of immortality, because any personal concept of time would come to an end as he is torn apart inside the Black Hole.  All that would survive would be his mass or energy.

The possibility that the universe had no beginning, no moment of creation.

So long as the universe had a beginning we could suppose it had a creator.  But if the universe is completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would neither be created nor destroy.  It would simply be.  What place, then, for a creator?

Brandon Carter

Eventually, things would be going off so fast, and it would be so explosive that you yourself would be destroyed by the explosion, and that would be the end.  But it would be a very exciting way to end one's life.

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John Wheeler - distinguished-looking gentleman, gray suit, blue shirt, dark red bowtie, red handkerchief in pocket, glasses, thinning gray hair; later, light gray suit, white shirt with dark stripes, red-white-and-navy diagonally striped tie

Roger Penrose - young looking, dark hair, part on left side, cowlick, striped shirt, dark suit, seated at desk with globe on it and bust behind him

Dennis Sciama - red tie, gray hair, thick eyebrows

Brandon Carter - Australian, baby-blue shirt, green tie, charcoal vest, zig-zag patterned jacket

John Taylor ? - dark gray suit, light blue shirt, dark greenish-blue tie, dark hair with a little gray, paneled room, sounds like Michael Caine