Ask A Genius 379 – Mathertime
September 11, 2018
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You have an announcement. What’s up?
Rick Rosner: I am happy to announce. At the prodding of a mutual friend, who took Lance, J.D., and me out to dinner, Lance said, “Why don’t you put your science money where your science mouth is, Rick, and actually start working with some scientists to see if your work goes anywhere?”
I started some baby work with a professional physicist named Dylan. He said we can get a paper published in a journal, which can discuss one falsifiable aspect of our theory. That is, if the universe is older than it appears to be, then there should be stuff in the universe that appears to be older than the age of the universe.
For years, you and I have been sending article links back-and-forth to each other about the universe is as old as this and the universe is as old as that. Often, the plus or minus on this old thing, whether a white dwarf, an early galaxy.
They find a galaxy 12.8 billion years old plus or minus 2 billion years with the plus end, making it 14 billion years, is old than the Big Bang age of the universe. There is a lot of stuff out there.
As a first project, I want to put together a compendium of all the candidates for all the stuff that, potentially, the general class of objects or classes of objects and the individual objects in the universe that have the potential to be older than the cosmos.
I will get feedback from you, Scott, and also credit you in the paper. But things are starting to turn. What we have been doing has been doing, that is, to the extent that we have been doing this stuff, I believe somebody could build a relatively complete understanding of what we’re trying to do, and what this project’s pluses and minuses are.
Where it might agree or false short with experimental evidence, but, I agree. It is time to put a few science clothes on, to see what on it can be done via standard science channels. Do you agree with that?
Jacobsen: It seems like a good idea to me. I note two points of contact within the conversation. One in the academic world. One outside it. Both seem partial and legitimate but not complete.
On the inside, academia seems to work as a means for quality control, to keep cranks out of the mainstream conversation. It provides basic training for people who will work with those leading in the field.
So, it provides the proper skills, the proper knowledge, and keeps cranks out. On the outside, it can prevent people who legitimately may have revolutionary ideas out of the conversation.
Rosner: I agree with both of those things. However, the math and demographics of it. There are many more cranks than people who have revolutionary ideas that turn out to be good. So, though, it is a baby with the bathwater situation.
You have to limit cranks. Otherwise, nobody ever gets anything done because you’re dealing with people wearing tinfoil hats. 99.9% of the theories on the outside will be not great. On the other hand, you may be missing a potential revolution. But the math is daunting.
Project one may lead to a paper. Under that project, any good theory of the universe should be able to go from the laws of information to the structure and dimensionality of the universe.
With that in mind, a baby step in that direction would be a paper that discusses whether there is more space if you could observe space from inside a black hole or an apparent black hole than the amount of space as observed from the outside (the black hole).
Even that sentence, it has a lot wrong with it. A black hole probably contains a singularity. So, there is nothing inside of it. So, that needs to be modified. But the general idea, there is a concentration of matter you’d find in a planet or a sun, or a neutron star, or something that approaches a black hole.
It might define space to such an extent that the scale of space is shrunk down, which effectively makes more space within that object, more volume within that objects. To the extent, that I think there is no such thing as a black hole.
Because the processes that make for a black hole shrink space down in the black hole. You get a black hole when gravitational forces are so strong that they overcome all possible forces in the universe and then it squishes down to zero radius down to a point – a fuzzy quantum-mechanical point but still a point.
Under a theory where the interactions among matter define space, you never get to the maximally squashy point because matter creates its own extra space by defining space more and more precisely as it shrinks down, as the ball of matter shrinks down into itself.
Until, at some point, you reach a limit of compactness. That is where things get hung up – and that stops short of being a black hole. Project two would be examining the math of that. If there is more space in an object with a gravitational field than you would think than observing that object from outside and using normal geometry, I did a rough calculation.
It would be on the scale for something on the Earth – mass and radius of the Earth. The extra space would be, if you could do it, the diameter of the Earth observed from inside of the Earth if you could somehow do it.
It would be 8 millimeters wider than if you viewed it from 100,000 miles away. A tiny little effect, 8 millimeters different in a measurement of an 8,000-mile diameter. Dylan, the physicist, was excited about the first idea.
We have not gotten into the second idea in depth. Since he is a traditionally rooted physicist, We will see if he is as persuadable. He is an enthusiastic guy. It is good he is willing to dive into it. But I feel I will need to do more fast-talking to talk him into idea number two. That is all I got for this.
[End of recorded material]
Authors[1]
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Editor-in-Chief, In-Sight Publishing
Footnotes
[1] Four format points for the session article:
- Bold text following “Scott Douglas Jacobsen:” or “Jacobsen:” is Scott Douglas Jacobsen & non-bold text following “Rick Rosner:” or “Rosner:” is Rick Rosner.
- Session article conducted, transcribed, edited, formatted, and published by Scott.
- Footnotes & in-text citations in the interview & references after the interview.
- This session article has been edited for clarity and readability.
For further information on the formatting guidelines incorporated into this document, please see the following documents:
- American Psychological Association. (2010). Citation Guide: APA. Retrieved from http://www.lib.sfu.ca/system/files/28281/APA6CitationGuideSFUv3.pdf.
- Humble, A. (n.d.). Guide to Transcribing. Retrieved from http://www.msvu.ca/site/media/msvu/Transcription%20Guide.pdf.
License and Copyright
License
In-Sight Publishing and In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at www.in-sightjournal.com and www.rickrosner.org.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Rick Rosner, and In-Sight Publishing and In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 2012-2017. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Rick Rosner, and In-Sight Publishing and In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Rick Rosner 