Hawking black hole radiation and quantum gravitation

Foundations of physics and/or philosophy of physics, and in particular, posts on unresolved or controversial issues

Hawking black hole radiation and quantum gravitation

Postby Yablon » Wed Sep 18, 2019 7:07 pm

Dear SPF friends:

For the past week or so, motivated by some discussions I was having in the thread at http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/0 ... ys-to.html, regarding my longstanding view that Hawking radiation is one of the most important discoveries to date toward a theory of quantum gravitation, I decided in the words of one of the discussants to not be a "spectator," but to actually develop my thoughts about this in detail. So that is what I have done at:

https://jayryablon.files.wordpress.com/ ... on-1.5.pdf

The abstract is as follows:

We demonstrate how Hawking black hole radiation provides the theoretical foundation for understanding the universally-observed Planck blackbody radiation spectrum. This is based on showing how raising the temperature of a blackbody is synonymous with probing the quantum gravitational / Planck / geometrodynamic vacuum more closely via the Wein displacement law, similarly to how providing more energy in particle physics probes more deeply into the smallest components of matter. Two new experiments are proposed to contradict or fail to contradict these conclusions. The first entails a close examination of the shortest wavelengths of a blackbody spectrum, where a complete cutoff of these wavelengths below a quantified threshold – not merely a very-steep intensity reduction – is predicted. This is a type of photoelectric effect for photons. The second entails testing for predicted time dilations in the vicinity of a radiating blackbody.

At only 16 pages of text, this paper is one of my shortest ever, and I wrote it start to finish over about 72 hours. Now, back to the EPR / Bell business. Maybe.

I welcome your feedback, and if there is nothing fundamentally problematic, I do plan to submit this for publication in short order.

Best to all,

Jay
Yablon
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Re: Hawking black hole radiation and quantum gravitation

Postby gill1109 » Fri Sep 20, 2019 6:23 am

Well, this is far outside my field, but I am studying Sabine's blog and the discussion https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/09/the-five-most-promising-ways-to.html, *and* starting to read Wald's (1984) book ... hopefully, I have caught up enough by the time of our symposium, to appreciate the quantum gravity side of the quantum foundations debate.
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Re: Hawking black hole radiation and quantum gravitation

Postby Yablon » Fri Sep 20, 2019 7:49 am

gill1109 wrote:Well, this is far outside my field, but I am studying Sabine's blog and the discussion https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/09/the-five-most-promising-ways-to.html, *and* starting to read Wald's (1984) book ... hopefully, I have caught up enough by the time of our symposium, to appreciate the quantum gravity side of the quantum foundations debate.

Richard, I highly recommend that you and anyone else interested in this topic start by studying Wheeler's seminal 1957 paper: On the nature of quantum geometrodynamics.

I see it two places online, but with paywalls for each:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/a ... 1657900507
https://www.scribd.com/document/3498281 ... namics-pdf

I have a 35 year old hardcopy which I would scan and share, but it is at home back in New York and I am now on the West Coast for the next 3 weeks.

It is a short paper, but what is amazing is that the Planck scale math at the root of such a challenging subject is just the very simple algebra which I replicated in section 2 of what I wrote to start this thread.

Jay
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Re: Hawking black hole radiation and quantum gravitation

Postby gill1109 » Fri Sep 20, 2019 8:16 am


There are no walls for me. University library...
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Re: Hawking black hole radiation and quantum gravitation

Postby Yablon » Fri Sep 20, 2019 8:16 am

gill1109 wrote:Well, this is far outside my field . . .

In one very important way this is right in the center of your field: The Planck blackbody distribution is a continuous statistical distribution for the discrete emissions of photons of various wavelengths. Pure statistics. And what Hawking made, can be seen as a statistical discovery.

In this regard, let me copy here, what I said from pages 5 to 6 in what I just posted:

"...All of this was known to Wheeler in 1957. But what Wheeler did not know, was the answer to the following question: “What type of statistical energy distribution is operative in the Planck vacuum?”

It was Hawking, by discovering black hole radiation until 1974, who supplied the answer to this question: Because the geometrodynamic vacuum is one omnipresent black hole, and because the event horizon of any black hole emits a blackbody spectrum with a temperature given by (1.1), the energy distribution of fluctuations in the quantum gravitational vacuum is a Planck blackbody spectrum. It is almost impossible to overstate the importance of this. Yes, it was known since 1957 that the Planck vacuum must have some distribution of energies. But, a priori, this distribution could have been a Gaussian, or any other one of dozens of known distributions. Until Hawking, there was no reason to suspect that the actual physical distribution of energies would be given by the Planck blackbody spectrum, and not by some other spectrum."
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Re: Hawking black hole radiation and quantum gravitation

Postby Yablon » Wed Oct 02, 2019 1:34 pm

To all:

I have updated the paper now titled "Hawking Radiation as the Theoretical Foundation for Blackbody Radiation" and posted it here:

https://jayryablon.files.wordpress.com/ ... on-3.0.pdf

I pulled the time dilation piece which was is my earlier draft, because I don’t believe it is actually correct. But the short wavelength cutoff I predict in the Planck spectrum will be experimentally detectable if it exists in nature, and the Wein displacement law provides every reason to believe that it does. This is all reviewed in section 3.

If you want to go straight to the bottom line, look at Figure 1 on page 14 and the magnified region shown in Figure 2 on page 18. I predict that there will be a complete cutoff of photons in the left portion of Figure 2, versus 1 photon for every peak-wavelength photons predicted by Plank's law, due to the black holes of Hawking cutting off photons above a certain frequency in a photonic variant of the photoelectric effect, see (3.13).

Experimental confirmation of this would establish that Hawking radiation underlies Planck blackbody radiation, and that thermodynamics generally, is rooted in quantum gravitation.

As always, feedback is appreciated.

Jay
Yablon
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Posts: 365
Joined: Tue Feb 04, 2014 10:39 pm
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