Citation Needed (random)

[elainegrey]

What does this sentence mean?

Despite the fact that this has been done previously, a team lead by Lotte Mertens from the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands has created something brand-new.

This -- https://blog.physics-astronomy.com/2022/11/scientists-created-black-hole-in-lab.html -- whole article makes me want to scream.

Maybe it's pointing to this "breaking news" from Dec 2.

https://thedebrief.org/black-hole-simulated-in-the-lab-suddenly-starts-glowing-potentially-pointing-to-a-unified-theory-of-gravity/

ugh

Comments

[amaebi]

Without having clicked through-- wow, what a sentence.

I hope to return later today to read about simulated black holes in labs.

[elainegrey]

THANK YOU.

Here's the paper - https://journals.aps.org/prresearch/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.4.043084 -- it sounds like the computer simulation in a one dimensional space suggests that one could conceive of creating a one dimensional model in a lab to observe quantum behavior analogous to that in a black hole? It reminds me of the time reversal experiments i was part of once upon a time. Mathematically, for the nuclear reaction, if you reversed the charge and the spin, it was equivalent to reversing time. (Eg: "Parity and time reversal symmetry nonconservation in neutron-nucleus interactions"). Time reversal and synthetic black holes sound far more impressive than "math says this is the same as that other thing."

[amaebi]

Thank you!

I am not at all a physics jock, but I have a reasonable amount of maths, and by using the actual article's abstract to help with the two pop articles you linked-- well, your read sounds absolutely bang-on to me.

Tangentially:

I am reminded of Star Trek characters constantly going to test some theory on the Holodeck, as if the Holodeck represented Reality in All Its Majesty instead of a program made by the same sorts of persons who want to test the whatever. I find it unnerving that the writers never seem to have noticed that.

In economics, too, I constantly found that my students and my colleagues got confused and thought of mathematical models of stripped-down versions of living interactions as reality, which was a equally unnerving. (Though interestingly and horribly, in the 1980s and 1990s the bullshit macroeconomic models of conservatives were initially sold as being more "elegant" than previously prevailing Keynesian models.) For economists, unfortunately, worship of mathematical tools seems culturally to tend to distract economists from remembering that they/we're actually telling stories about how humans interact through institutions, and how that pans out.