From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Sat Apr 26 2003 - 06:05:03 MDT
Damien Broderick wrote:
> At 07:33 PM 4/25/03 -0400, Eliezer wrote:
>
>>>thunderbolt singularity?
>
>>It's a consistent GR solution for an evaporating black hole which exposes
>>the naked singularity
>
> Erm...
>
> < We interpret the prediction of thunderbolts as indicating that the semi
> classical approximation breaks down at the end point of black hole
> evaporation, and we would expect that a full quantum treatment would
> replace the thunderbolt with a burst of high energy particles. The energy
> in such a burst would be too small to account for the observed gamma ray
> bursts. >
Their reason for this is essentially Fermian - they expect at least one
evaporating black hole in our past light cone, which may ignore the
anthropic principle (I didn't see any calculations on the expected number
of black holes or their evaporation time). Also, if you Google a bit
farther you'll find that people are still working through thunderbolt
theories, including (I think) quantum treatments that still allow for a
thunderbolt effect. The point really is not so much to suppose that
naturally evaporating black holes give rise to thunderbolts, but to ask
whether it might be possible to create thunderbolts artificially - i.e.,
whether the Wave of Death is still a self-consistent GR solution that can
be created given the right initial conditions, just ones a bit more
elaborate than those in the ordinary black hole. The metapoint is that
physics may allow for Much Scarier Things than the mere popguns that are
black holes and supernovas.
-- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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