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dimensions is crazy.
stephen Hawking, one mof my physics heroes (I have many) won the Nobel prize in physics for work he did on black holes. teen tiny miniscule areas of space behave in very very strange ways once you get past a certain tinyness (Planck distance.) The same holds true for time. once you get below Planck Time (something like 1 billionth of a second or so) the universe takes on strange characteristics.
for the longest, after einsteins equations predicted what we now call black holes (something with a gravity so massive that nothing can escape the gravuitational pull, even light/energy), there was a large argument as to whether black holes were detectable. To be detectable some form of information must leave the black hole, either radiation or particles or something, and most people believed that was impossible.
Hawking, while his wife was getting him dressed for bed, thought about this. Quantum physics states that, below planck size, even the most empty vacuum of deep space is actually a froth of virtual particles and their anti particles popping in and out of existance, annhihilating each other before the planck time has elapsed, thereby noever affecting the overall entropy of the universe, and being undetectable to us. Hawking thought about this, and reasoned, that if along a black hole's event horizon, a particle and it's anti particle popped into existance, and one of the two was sucked into the balck hole, the other would NOT pop out of existance, and would instead be shot out from the black hole's event horizon. seeing as how in even a cubic centimeter of space there are trillion sof virtual particles popping up and down, odds are quite a few would be split up by a black hole's ebvent horizon. he then proceeded to do the calqulations for a typical black hole,a dn arrived at a certain number, very very low, of radiation coming from a black hole's edge due to this phenomenom that he "discovered" while getting ready for bed.
sure enough, radio telescopes were trained on areas thought to be black holes, and the very very low radiation was found, totally consistent with hawking's estimates!!!!!
crazy!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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